Which Colleges Pay Off for Low-Income Students?

I schemed through the article, I think the data is BS. There is no way West Coast University beats Georgia Institute of Technology in earning.

 

Graduates of for-profit colleges have low earnings, even when the institution has a graduation rate above 50%.

 

Community colleges.

 

Plus cost effectiveness.

 

As someone who is a community college advocate, our enrollments at my local community college declined when we stopped open admissions with the requirement of having a certain reading score on the college entrance exam to be accepted. Over the past 12 years, we have seen more than a 55% decline and they have barely started to gain back traction again.

 

I'm a huge advocate of community college. I went to community college myself. It is a huge winner in cost effectiveness. I think they are probably also very cost effective from a tax and community support perspective. The article only considers four year degrees. Community College would be a whole different analysis from the perspective of the article.

 

When I get a chance, I'm going to look more closely at the schools. I saw Devry sitting very low, and they focus on tech and business.

As for community colleges, it's better to drop out with a few thousand in debt than tens of thousands in debt. The same applies to open entry, podunk state universities. It's cheaper to flunk out of those than most for-profit colleges.

 

Some education advocates have supported pre-admission tests like this to avoid the trap of needing to repeat 1 or 2 years of remedial courses before life gets in the way and you exit with far less than 60 credits.

I'm generally in favor of open admission as much as possible and letting the testing and assignment process sort themselves out, but that risks people falling through the cracks.