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Community College Health Programs and the Labor Market: The Case of Registered Nurses
Mon, April 11, 11:45am to 1:15pm, Convention Center, Floor: Level Three, Ballroom South FoyerAbstract
Increasing demand for skilled workers and a rising college premium have reinvigorated interest in community colleges career technical programs, especially in health fields. In this paper I show causal estimates of the labor market impact of an associate’s degree in nursing by leveraging a lottery-based admissions policy at a large community college program in California.
Health training programs are of particular interest given the recent growth of the health workforce, especially among the types of occupations whose training occurs in community colleges. As employment increases, so too has demand for training in these occupations, leading many community colleges to institute separate admissions policies for entry to individual programs.
I use administrative data on the admissions lottery process at a large registered nursing program in California, including information on all applicants since 2005. I link this information to administrative data on the universe of California community college students between 1992 and 2015, including their academic records, demographics, quarterly earnings, and quarterly industry of employment.
I find that graduates experience almost a doubling in earnings in the years following their exit from the program. This result is large, but comparable to those found in the broader literature on community college programs. The earnings effect is driven by a 36 percentage point increase in the employment of graduates in the health industry. I do not find, however, any effect of the program on employment per se. This paper contributes to a growing literature on the labor market returns to community college career technical programs, and is among the few papers to estimate the returns to a typical, existing postsecondary program using variation from a random lottery.