This panel will examine how labor market returns vary across different pathways through community college. Compared to students in four-year institutions, community college students face a different set of constraints when investing in their postsecondary education. The existence of these constraints may explain why – despite consistently high returns to college – many academically qualified students either fail to enroll, or fail to complete an award, or enroll in a two-year institution and then transfer to a four-year college. In this panel we propose three papers on the returns to investments in community college. W apply the standard human capital framework with suboptimal investments being explained by the existence of constraints. We investigate three of the more influential constraints on optimal investments in postsecondary education by community college students. To test for these constraints, we use three large-scale, state-wide longitudinal datasets with individual student information on college enrollments and post-college earnings. First, we examine constraints on financing of college. We identify how student financial aid availability influences attainment in community college and the consequent effect on earnings. We use data on all community college students in North Carolina and exploit the exogenous variation in aid availability across campuses to identify its impact. Second, we examine income constraints. We show students’ need to work whilst enrolled in college influences their attainment and post-college earnings. We use data on wage trajectories of all community college students across Virginia to see how in-college wages are associated with post-college wages. Finally, we examine an intertemporal constraint, i.e. the need to complete college rapidly so as to minimize tuition costs and time out of the labor makret. We examine the earnings trajectories of students who choose to take shorter vocational programs rather than traditional BA degrees in similar fields. We use a large scale dataset from California to see identify the differences in earnings between students with different awards in a given vocational/technical field and between awards in vocational/technical fields and awards in other fields. Together these studies provide evidence on how community college students invest in their postsecondary human capital, on the wage returns obtained from college, and on what constraints influence the students’ ability to make optimal investments.