Grads' Earnings Can Contribute to Community College Decisions

Students interested in a career training program now have more information in making that educational investment decision.

The Department of Education for the first time released data on the earnings of graduates from thousands of different career training programs on its website last month. The data release, the first of two, highlights the outcomes of students attending career college programs. The second part of the data, which will include debt information, will be released next month.

"This will give us more data to better advice students about making wiser, economically-sound decisions about their future," says Kate Simmons, a guidance counselor at Brewster High School in New York, where more than 20 percent of her students enroll at two-year institutions. "I can help my students decide on what is the best return on investment for them without taking out too many loans."

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With this information, a student interested in nursing at Central Alabama Community College, for example, can now go to the education department's financial aid website and find out that recent graduates of the school's vocational nurse training program earn around $32,000.

The department intends to add these data to the College Scorecard -- a consumer tool that provides data on cost, debt, graduation and post-college earnings -- early next year. More than 3,000 institutions that offer career training programs will be required to show this information to prospective students before enrolling in January, a government official says.

"For the first time we have information for every career program in the country about how much students who left the program a few years ago are earning," says Debbie Cochrane, vice president of the Institute For College Access and Success, or TICAS, a California-based nonprofit for higher education. "It's important information in deciding whether or where to enroll."

From the new data, there are a couple ways students can evaluate a career college program.

-- View earnings by program: In the past, experts say, most information on student outcomes were based on national or regional career salaries.

"The primary takeaway is there is a lot of variation certainly from program to program. Within the same program, we see a lot of variation of what different graduates earn," says Cochrane.

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A program for a certificate in heating, ventilation and air conditioning -- commonly called HVAC -- can vary widely, the TICAS spokeswoman says as an example.

From the new earnings data, a prospective student can compare student outcomes for the same type of program. Graduates with an HVAC certificate from Houston Community College, for example, earn $28,115 on average compared with those who attended Lone Star College--North Harris, where students made $37,923 on average.

The department's gainful employment earnings data also show that programs offered by community colleges outperform comparable for-profit programs.

Graduates of public undergraduate certificate program earn nearly $9,000 more than graduates who attended a for-profit, the department's data show.

"Places the make promises that sound too good to be true are likely to be venues where you get ripped off," says Barmak Nassirian, director of federal policy at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities in the District of Columbia.

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-- Compare debt-to-earnings rates: Debt data is also important in considering an educational outcome, experts say.

"Programs with higher earnings may not look as good in light of their debt," says Cochrane. "The debt data, which isn't released yet, is important to consider in light of earnings."

Calculating the debt-to earnings rates can determine whether a career college is leaving a student with unaffordable debt and poor employment prospects, government officials say.

"You can use the data for someone not cut out for a four-year college to look at jobs, where people didn't overspend on their education," says Simmons , from Brewster High School.

Experts say debt isn't a terrible thing if students can repay their loans comfortably on their salaries.

Institutions with career college programs that perform poorly in debt-to-earnings measures and fail to improve their quality will eventually be barred from participating the department's federal student loan program, officials say.

"This data is going to help us sell community colleges a little better, and we can look at what they're earning and how much debt they take out," Simmons says.

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Farran Powell is an education reporter at U.S. News, covering paying for college and graduate school. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at fpowell@usnews.com.