Princeton University Library Catalog
- Author/Artist:
- Huie, Christopher [Browse]
- Format:
- Senior thesis
- Language:
- English
- Advisor(s):
- Neilson, Christopher [Browse]
- Department:
- Princeton University. Department of Economics [Browse]
- Class year:
- 2016
- Description:
- 95 pages
- Summary note:
- For-profit colleges (“for-profits”) in the United States are higher education institutions
that are operated by profit-seeking corporations. They have been criticized for their high
costs, poor student outcomes, and unethical business practices, but also have been lauded
for effectively preparing nontraditional, underprivileged students for the labor market.
With new data from College Scorecard, this study evaluates how five student outcomes—
mean income, completion, retention, repayment, and cohort default rate—differ between
for-profits and non-profits without and with student controls. This study also presents and
analyzes the distributions of school fixed effects on each of these outcomes by type of
institution without and with student controls, with a focus on the difference between forprofits
and non-profits. These analyses show mixed results: with student controls, forprofits
do not improve in mean income and cohort default rate, but they do relatively
improve with completion, retention, and repayments rates, though they are still the worst
performing for retention rates relative to non-profits. Some of this evidence is
substantiated by a robustness check with a different set of controls, but another
robustness check suggests that the sample this study uses is biased. These results may be
suggestive of policy in light of an ongoing debate of the regulation of for-profits.
