Community College Labor Market Outcomes

How do Community College Graduates Fare in the Labor Market?
Well... it's complicated.

Community colleges can be engines of economic mobility, providing students with the skills they need to find meaningful and stable employment. However, research shows that the specific college a student attends and the program they study are some of the strongest predictors of their resulting labor market outcomes after graduation, and there exists substantial variation in outcomes even within the same college across programs, and within the same program across colleges. We also know that there are meaningful differences in outcomes across student subgroups, even when we control for college and program. Lastly, graduates of some colleges and programs might find higher wages after graduation, but it seems that higher wages do not always bring higher stability of employment or stability of job. In other words, the overall economic benefit of a community college degree may be a much more complicated thing to understand than we give it credit for.

To examine these dynamics and assist the public in understanding this important variation in student outcomes, we've created a dashboard that allows you to explore the outcomes of community college graduates across multiple labor market metrics, for each possible combination of college and program. This can be further broken down by student subgroups of age, sex, and race/ethnicity using the options below.

For now, note that all of the following data is simulated/fictional due to the preliminary nature of our analyses. We hope you enjoy this proof-of-concept for conveying these complex findings in the future!