For-Profit on the Job Application

Career College Central Summary:

The newly released working paper by five economists tracked callbacks by employers in response to 8,914 fictitious job applications.
The research found no statistically significant difference in how the two sectors stacked up.
An interpretation of those results, however, depends on who you ask.
Employers’ overall response rate — meaning a positive, non-perfunctory reply via phone or e-mail — was 11.6 percent for applications that listed community colleges compared to 11.3 percent for those that listed for-profits.
Likewise, the split for interview requests was tilted slightly in community colleges’ favor, at 5.3 percent versus 4.7 percent.
Those splits fell well within the study’s margin of error.
To the five researchers who conducted the study, the primary takeaway is that for-profits are a worse investment.
“Our results provide no indication that résumés that list for-profit college credentials generate more employer interest than those that list community college credentials,” they wrote. “If anything, the opposite may be true.”
“It is more expensive to attend for-profit colleges,” he said, and the findings show a better return on investment for community college credentials because they produce a comparable result at a lower price to the student.
However, at least one expert who reviewed the study had the opposite response to its results.
“I would’ve expected that there would be strong negative effects of attending for-profits,” said Stephen R. Porter, a professor of higher education at North Carolina State University. “I was astounded that there was no difference between the groups.”
Given that critics and the news media often describe the for-profit sector as being “greedy degree mills,” Porter said, the study suggests that in the eyes of employers, the colleges “aren’t doing as bad of a job as we thought.”