How mobility of graduates complicates efforts to measure college value

As policymakers ramp up efforts to hold higher education accountable for the financial outcomes of their graduates, new research from Ford School professor Kevin Stange and colleagues reveals a major complicating factor: college graduates don’t always stay put. 

Earnings-based accountability measures are designed to promote greater return on the investments of students, families and taxpayers by penalizing programs with low value and steering students toward higher-value options. 

Recent bipartisan policy and regulation efforts, including in the latest federal budget reconciliation law, seek to address this by comparing graduates’ earnings to those of high school graduates in the same state as the college. These measures also account for local cost of living differences between states. 

However, as the authors point out, this assumes graduates remain in-state after earning their degrees. In reality, the share of students who move after graduation varies dramatically across different types of institutions. For example, graduates of community colleges and regional universities are more likely to stay local, while alumni from research-intensive and highly-selective four-year institutions often move farther away. As a result, applying the same accountability metrics across all colleges, without adjusting for where graduates actually live and work, risks unfairly penalizing some programs that send graduates farther afield, while being more lenient to others.

The brief concludes that the most accurate earnings-based accountability measures would compare a college graduate to other non-graduates who face similar economic conditions, wherever they live. Achieving this would require stronger data coordination at both the state and federal levels since current systems often fail to capture graduates who cross state lines after earning their degrees. 

>>Read “What the Migration of College Graduates Means for Earnings-Based Accountability” 

Coauthors: Johnathan Conzelmann (Denison University), Steven W. Hemelt (University of North Carolina), Brad Hershbein (W.E. Upjohn Institute), Andrew Simon (University of Virginia), and Kevin Stange (University of Michigan)