Do Employers Prefer Workers Who Attend For-Profit Colleges? Evidence from a Field Experiment

Cory Koedel, Rajeev Darolia, Paco Martorell, Katie Wilson and Francisco Perez-Arce

No 1411, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri

Abstract: This paper reports results from a resume-based field experiment designed to examine employer preferences for job applicants who attended for-profit colleges. For-profit colleges have seen sharp increases in enrollment in recent years despite alternatives such as public community colleges being much cheaper. We sent almost 9,000 fictitious resumes of young job applicants who recently completed their schooling to online job postings in six occupational categories and tracked employer callback rates. We find no evidence that employers prefer applicants with resumes listing a for-profit college relative to those whose resumes list either a community college or no college at all.

Keywords: for profit college; 2-year college; returns to education; resume field experiment; sub-baccalaureate degree (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 I28 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pgs.
Date: 2014-06-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-exp, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Do Employers Prefer Workers Who Attend For‐Profit Colleges? Evidence from a Field Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: Do Employers Prefer Workers Who Attend For-Profit Colleges? Evidence from a Field Experiment (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:umc:wpaper:1411

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