Publications

This brief describes the substantial role community colleges play in workforce education, what innovative colleges are doing to improve programming and labor market outcomes for participants, and how the federal government can support these efforts.

This paper examines returns to terminal associate degrees and certificates up to 11 years after students initially entered a community college in Ohio. The authors use an individual fixed-effects approach that controls for students’ pre-enrollment earnings and allows the returns to credential completion to vary over time.

This paper examines the labor market gains for students who enrolled at for-profit colleges after beginning their postsecondary education in community college.

This essay compares broad academic and vocational program goals, embodied skills, tasks, and jobs, with a focus primarily on community college students.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this CAPSEE working paper examines nonpecuniary labor market outcomes associated with different levels of postsecondary educational attainment.

This paper describes how community colleges became a major resource for the nation's workforce development requirements and discusses how this role continues to evolve to meet the needs of students, employers, and local communities.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this paper compares the academic and labor market outcomes of high school graduates who delay college enrollment and those who enroll in college immediately up to 13 years after high school completion.

This CAPSEE working paper compares credential production patterns of minority-serving institutions (MSIs) and non-MSIs by field of study and examines the extent to which they correspond to employment industry clusters in Alabama and California.

This report evaluates the implementation and impacts of Enhancing Programs for IT Certification (EPIC), a program that aims to expand access to computer and medical information technology credentials at six Kentucky community colleges.

This paper identifies the effects of licenses on a set of labor market outcomes for the college-educated workforce using newly available national Current Population Survey data merged with data from the U.S. Department of Labor on state-level, occupation-specific licensing requirements.

In this article for Change: The Magazine for Higher Learning, CCRC Founding Director and Teachers College President Thomas Bailey outlines the tradeoff between degrees and short-term credentials offered to community college students and describes how the colleges themselves may be able to help resolve this conflict.

Using national, survey, and college-system-level datasets, this paper estimates the association between stackable credentials and earnings, finding weakly positive and inconsistent gains from these award combinations.

This paper addresses empirical challenges in identifying stackable credentials, distinguishes three types of stackable awards, and estimates the number of persons who earn such awards. It then discusses the utility of these awards in meeting labor market demands and needs of students.

This CAPSEE working paper reviews results from fixed effects models of the earnings gains from completing an associate degree and compares them with ordinary least squares model estimates.

This CAPSEE working paper and accompanying brief review recent evidence from eight states on the labor market returns to credit accumulation, certificates, and associate degrees from community colleges using large-scale, statewide administrative datasets.

This CAPSEE working paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to provide new, nationally representative, non-experimental estimates of the returns to degrees, as well as to assess the possible limitations of single-state, administrative-data-based estimates.

This NBER working paper uses state administrative data and unemployment records to construct a variety of possible institution-level labor market outcome metrics to explore how sensitive institutional ratings are to the choice of labor market metric, length of follow-up, and inclusion of adjustments for student characteristics.

Using proximity to the closest four-year college as an instrumental variable, this CAPSEE working paper analyzes public higher education data from an anonymous state to examine how enrolling in summer credits can impact college and labor market outcomes.

This book chapter replicates and extends analyses completed in other statewide studies and estimates returns to credentials and credit accumulation for first-time college students who enrolled in the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) in 2004–2005 using a classic Mincerian approach.

This paper utilizes two complementary quasi-experimental strategies to identify causal effects of the WV PROMISE scholarship, a broad-based state merit aid program, up to 10 years post–college entry and examine important outcomes that have not previously been examined, including homeownership, neighborhood characteristics, and financial management.