The Economic Benefits of Pre-Baccalaureate Education: Results from State and Local Studies

For key stakeholders, national information on returns to pre-baccalaureate education is less valuable than data about states and local institutions. Students need local information to decide which college to attend and which program to pursue; administrators need evidence about their own colleges; and state policymakers need to know about their states’ community college systems and labor markets. To address this issue, some states have improved the collection of labor market data on their students. The major innovation has been to shift from conventional questionnaire to Unemployment Insurance (UI) data, linking identification numbers of students in various educational institutions with the identification numbers in UI wage records. This brief presents findings from five states that are in the lead in using UI data: California, Washington, Florida, Texas, and North Carolina. Because each state takes a different approach, the results highlight different analytical possibilities for state and local data.