Examining the Earnings Trajectories of Community College Students Using a Piecewise Growth Curve Modeling Approach

ABSTRACT

Policymakers have become increasingly concerned with measuring—and holding colleges accountable for—students’ labor market outcomes. In this article we introduce a piecewise growth curve approach to analyzing community college students’ labor market outcomes, and we discuss how this approach differs from two popular econometric approaches: Mincerian and individual fixed-effects models. Our results suggest that three assumptions underpinning econometric approaches—that across-student variation is constant across time, that the model specifies a counterfactual that is appropriate for all members of the sample, and that the impacts of a given award are fixed across time—may not be well founded. We then highlight how insights gained from the growth curve approach can be used to strengthen evolving econometric analyses of labor market returns.