The Labor-Market Returns to Community College Degrees, Diplomas, and Certificates

By Christopher Jepsen, Kenneth R. Troske, Paul A. Coomes. Journal of Labor Economics, 2014

348 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article provides one of the first rigorous estimations of the labor-market returns to community college certificates and diplomas, as well as estimations of the returns to the more commonly studied associate’s degrees. Using administrative data from Kentucky, we estimate panel-data models that control for differences among students in precollege earnings and educational aspirations. Associate’s degrees and diplomas have quarterly earnings returns of nearly $2,400 for women and $1,500 for men, compared with much smaller returns for certificates. There is substantial heterogeneity in returns across fields of study. Degrees, diplomas, and—for women—certificates correspond with higher levels of employment.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7cf4a3a16f57d84f9d672e9ed1ef15094d2596fa

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Citations in the corpus

What About Certificates? Evidence on the Labor Market Returns to Nondegree Community College Awards in Two States (2016, methodology): “This approach follows previous literature in applying the individual fixed-effects method to estimate the returns to community college credentials (Bahr, 2014; Carruthers & Sanford, 2015; Dadgar & Trimble, 2014; Jepsen et al., 2014; Stevens et al., 2015).”
Labor Market Returns to Sub-Baccalaureate Credentials (2015, methodology): “By contrast, taking advantage of the large sample sizes of their administrative data, Jepsen et al. (2014) examined returns to associate degrees, long-term certificates, and short-term certificates across fields of study.”
Student Loan Nudges: Experimental Evidence on Borrowing and Educational Attainment (2017, methodology): “For the returns to credit completion within CCA, we use estimates from Jepsen et al. (2014), who use an individual fixed-effects approach to estimate the effect of community college credits and credentials on earnings and employment for two cohorts of students enrolling in the Kentucky Community & T”
Community Colleges and Upward Mobility (2019, background): “A small but growing set of papers relax this assumption in panel specifications with individual fixed effects (e.g. Jacobson et al., 2005; Jepsen et al., 2014), but this approach necessarily focuses on older workers who have accumulated pre-enrollment earnings histories.”
The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers (2017, positive): “…degrees, certification programs, and even completed community college credits generate wage increases that, on average, more than offset their costs(Liu et al., 2015; Minaya and Scott-Clayton, 2020; Kane and Rouse, 1995; Marcotte et al., 2005; Belfield and Bailey, 2011; Jepsen et al., 2014).”
The Medium-Term Labor Market Returns to Community College Awards: Evidence From North Carolina (2014, methodology): “This finding contrasts with those of Jacobson et al. (2005), Jepsen et al. (2011), and Marcotte et al. (2005), who found more consistently that younger students benefitted more across award types.”
Online Reputation Management: Estimating the Impact of Management Responses on Consumer Reviews (2015, methodology): “Following common practice (see, e.g., Heckman and Smith (1999); Jepsen et al. (2014); Friedrich and Ording (2013); Li et al. (2011)), we correct for transient endogeneity caused by Ashenfelter’s dip by computing long-run differences, where we symmetrically exclude a number of periods around the…”