Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Six years after first enrolling, two-thirds of first time community college students have not earned a credential or degree (National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 2010, Table 2). Research suggests that above and beyond academic needs and financial difficulties, non-academic supports such as advising, information, and curricular structuring can have large effects on persistence and labor market outcomes for community college students (e.g. Bettinger and Baker, 2014; Scott-Clayton, 2011).

This study focuses on the potential effects of one such intervention—the provision of targeted labor market information—on student behavior. Research suggests that such information could affect a number of outcomes, including student persistence (by creating a link between courses and career outcomes) and students’ labor market outcomes (by affecting curricular choices and career choices). The provision of accurate, digestible, and targeted labor market information has the potential to be a cheap, scalable, and feasible intervention that could meaningfully affect student behavior.

But in order for such an intervention to work, we must understand two things: (1) to what degree students value courses of study with better labor market prospects and (2) how accurate student’s knowledge of the labor market prospects of different degrees and certificates is. In other work we address the first issue, in this study we examine the second.

Our study is the first to examine these questions for community college students, a particularly important and policy relevant population. We model our survey (administered to 376 students at two community colleges in California’s Bay Area) after previous work that has looked at the labor market knowledge of students in selective four-year school, so we can examine how this population differs from other groups. Our uniquely broad set of questions allows us to examine many facets of labor market outcomes.

Findings

We find that community college students have broadly accurate rankings of the labor market outcomes for broad categories of majors. However, on average, students overestimate expected salaries and underestimate the probability and stability of employment. Low-income students are more likely than their higher income peers to make large errors in prediction. Similarly, students in their first term make larger errors than students who have been enrolled longer. Students are more accurate in predicting the labor market outcomes associated with majors they are more likely to choose, and they are also more optimistic about the outcomes of these majors.

We also examined students’ beliefs about the labor market outcomes associated with the specific majors they were considering choosing. We find that students have very accurate information about labor market outcomes for vocational degrees that are tightly linked to specific careers (radiology technician, for example), and have much less accurate information for majors that are not as tightly linked to careers. Importantly, students predict very similar outcomes for majors that cluster together thematically but are associated with very different vocational trajectories (business, economics, and accounting, for example). The nuanced findings from this study provide guidance on how a potential informational intervention could be optimally structured.