This just in: employers care about where you went to college.
That may not seem like news. But while that might make you think of employers picking Ivy League grads over people with community college diplomas, a new study analyzes a different angle: how degrees from online for-profit colleges affect your chances in the job market. The answer: adversely.
In a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, economists from Harvard, Berkeley, and the NBER find that an online, for-profit diploma gives young job applicants a significant disadvantage in getting a callback from an employer.
What the researchers did
The economists sent out nearly 9,600 fake resumes to job postings found on a major job website. The jobs were either in business or health care and all had work experience requirements of four years or less, to make sure that college was of bigger importance to employers (consider whether an employer really cares where you went to college once you’ve proven yourself over 20 years of work). In addition, some of the jobs required a BA, while others did not.
The resumes were based on real resumes and designed to depict young workers — people with four or six years of work experience after high school, including both high school-only and college graduates. Among the resumes attributed to recent college grads, they listed either public universities of varying degrees of selectivity or well-known for-profit institutions. In addition, those for-profit degrees were sometimes obtained online.
Source: VOX | Danielle Kurtzleben
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