Dive Brief:
- Job applicants who have attended for-profit colleges don’t enjoy any advantage over those who have attended community colleges or no college at all, according to a new study from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research .
- Researchers for the study sent 9,000 fake resumes to job postings in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Sacramento, and Seattle, and then measured the response rate from the prospective employers.
- Though the difference isn’t statistically significant, the study finds that employers actually favor job applicants with community college schooling over those with for-profit schooling.
Dive Insight:
The construction of the study offers a little wiggle room for advocates of for-profit colleges — it’s possible that students with help from job-placement services from their for-profit schools are more successful, or that they’re more successful once the interview phase begins. But that’s grasping at straws. The study also found that any advantage that applicants with community college schooling enjoy over those with no college background is statistically insignificant. The authors of the study are from the University of Missouri and the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
