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AEAweb: Do employers frown on for-profit colleges and online degrees?
It sure seems that the best place for your money is a public 2 or 4 year college yet does not matter if student passes certification exams however the cost of attending for-profit college kills the college degree advantage. The student loan debt wipes any advantage so the winner is a low cost solution like your local community college.
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But there is an argument that for-profit colleges are more responsive and innovative than stodgy universities that have been around for decades or centuries, and are nimble enough to accommodate nontraditional students and design career-oriented programs like criminal justice and health technology.
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but one way to judge the value of a degree would be to ask recruiters who routinely hire college graduates for entry-level positions how they feel when they see a for-profit or online college on a student’s resume
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can be used to measure the relative value of different types of credentials, ranging from an associate’s degree at a local for-profit college to an online bachelor’s to a degree from a selective public college.
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the for-profit student body is much more diverse. Students might be older, returning to school after years in the workforce, or may have GEDs rather than high school diplomas.
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the authors use an audit study, which in this case involves submitting a range of fictitious resumes to companies offering entry-level job openings
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They focused on jobs in business and health that required little or no work experience so they could focus on job openings where the educational background would be of primary importance to recruiters.
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When the researchers sent off resumes with BA’s from public colleges, the callback rate was about 8.5% on average. But resumes submitted for the same job openings listing degrees from online for-profit colleges got callbacks 25% less often.
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This may reflect greater recruiter trust in for-profit schools with an established presence in the community that may have produced good employees in the past.
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The authors hypothesize that when employers have an outside, objective source of information about a candidate (like a licensing exam score), college credentials are less important.
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the for-profit degree appears to be the less attractive investment.”
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In many cases, a for-profit associate’s degree did not result in higher call back rates than for applicants with no college experience listed at all.
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the results suggest that some graduates may face an uphill battle going on the job market with a for-profit college on their resume, especially if they have no other credential, test result, or occupational license to validate them.
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It seems to me, that all colleges are for profit. That’s the whole point of colleges is it not? They want students who are high achievers, who are projected to achieve great things in the future. Colleges want these students because ultimately, the students achievements will reflect upon the college that the student went to.
These colleges want to have a good reputation of churning out students who are high achievers because they want more students to apply to that college, colleges want to make money from those student’s tuition, from grants, from research that they publish, etc.
Ultimately, it seems to me that there’s no such thing as a non-profit college, and so if employers frown upon for-profit colleges, in theory, they would frown upon all colleges.