Master’s for hire: Experimental evidence on employers’ perceptions of master’s degrees from for-profit institutions

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Abstract

Master’s for hire: Experimental evidence on employers’ perceptions of master’s degrees from for-profit institutions

This correspondence study examines the extent to which employers distinguish between job applicants based on the type of institution from which they earned their master’s degree. I focus on job candidates who earned a master’s from one of three types of broad-access institutions (for-profits, online institutions, regional institutions), with a bachelor’s-only reference group. For the field experiment, I submitted 9,480 applications to job openings listed in 14 U.S. cities on two online job boards. Descriptively, I find that applicants with names suggesting they were Black men received 30% fewer positive responses from employers than did otherwise comparable applicants whose names suggested they were White women or White men. I find no evidence that employers had higher rates of positive response for any of the three master’s treatment groups, relative to candidates with only a bachelor’s degree. The null results are fairly precise, with 95% confidence intervals that rule out even comparatively small positive effects (i.e., no more than 9%, 14%, or 17% of the baseline mean for the regional master’s, online master’s, and for-profit master’s groups, respectively). Thus, even at the most conspicuous level–whether or not a job candidate had a master’s degree–employers’ responses overall did not differ meaningfully across the groups examined. These results indicate that employers are not especially responsive in their initial application decisions to master’s degrees in business from for-profit, online, and regional institutions, despite the investment of time and financial resources such degrees entail.

Author

• Christopher Bennett, U.S. Department of Education