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Career education is a vital pipeline to high demand jobs in the workforce. Students from all walks of life benefit from the opportunity to pursue their career education goals and find new employment opportunities. Join Dr. Jason Altmire, President and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU), as he discusses the issues and innovations affecting postsecondary career education. Twice monthly, he and his guests discuss politics, business, and current events impacting education and public policy.
Jason Altmire (00:00)
Hello and welcome to another edition of Career Education Report. I'm Jason Altmire and today we're going to talk about a study that had been done at the end of last year in 2025 for the National Bureau of Economic Research. And I just found it very interesting. I read it over the holidays and it deals with the intersection between the labor market strength and the enrollment in higher education.
And I wanted to have one of the co-authors on, the two authors were Joseph Winkleman from Harvard University and Joshua Goodman from Boston University. And we are grateful that Joshua Goodman has taken the time to be with us. So Josh, I appreciate you being here.
Joshua Goodman (00:48)
It's a pleasure to be here and get to talk to your audience about this.
Jason Altmire (00:51)
Maybe start a little bit by talking about your background and your research and what led to your interest in this topic.
Joshua Goodman (00:58)
Yeah, so I'm an economist by training. I study education policy and the economics of education. Long ago, I was a high school math teacher, but now I'm in higher education where I study both K-12 and higher education. And this particular project came out of a combination of my longstanding interest in the question of why and how people make the college choices that they do, but also the fact that from the summer of 22 to the summer of 2023,
I and my co-author, Joe Winkleman, worked at the Council of Economic Advisors in the Biden White House. And one of the questions we were asked is to think about the challenges facing the community college sector in particular. And that's part of what motivated our investigation of the phenomenon, this paper studies.
Jason Altmire (01:46)
Yeah. And president Biden, of course, and the first lady had an affinity for community colleges. And it's no surprise that they would have asked you to look into that. And I think when people think about declining college enrollment, you looked over the past 15 years, or at least the period from 2010 to 2025.
And you hear declining college enrollment. Most people think traditional college, boy, that's interesting. Why is that? There's this national debate on the value of college. Is it worth it? But you found that that decline in enrollment was driven almost entirely or a large portion of it was driven by community college declining enrollment. Can you talk about that finding?
Joshua Goodman (02:31)
That's right. So one of the motivations for writing this paper was the fact that there's been, I think, a very confused discussion about the state of college enrollment in this country. So on the one hand, it's true that college enrollments have been declining overall, but that often gets connected very quickly to questions about how expensive four-year colleges are. And that's
a little bit of a puzzle because it turns out it's not four-year colleges that are driving the decline in enrollment. It's actually enrollments in four-year colleges have been either growing or pretty steady depending on exactly what recent time period you look at. And so this paper was much more focused on highlighting the fact that the declines in college enrollment are really driven largely by the two-year community college sector, although also somewhat by the for-profit sector as well. And part of our goal here was to unpack why has that been happening? Should we be worried about it?
To what extent can we explain that decline through factors that are predictable?
Jason Altmire (03:30)
And part of your finding was sort of a technical issue related to the reclassification of community colleges. Can you explain what that was about?
Joshua Goodman (03:41)
Yeah, that's right. The federal government's big data set, IPEDS, the Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System, that is often used for public discussion about college enrollments, categorizes colleges by the highest degree that they offer. So Boston University, where I teach, would be called a four-year institution because we offer four-year degrees. Most community colleges would be called two-year institutions because they offer two-year degrees. But it turns out it's been an increasingly common practice for community colleges
to create four-year degree programs within them. It still might not be the thing that most students on those campuses are doing, but when they do that, when they start offering one BA program, for example, the federal government reclassifies them as being a four-year degree-granting institution, and therefore it makes the community college population seem to shrink only because some of these colleges are being reclassified. And so we just make this little technical point about the data that...
It's true that community colleges appear to have shrunk very dramatically over the past 15 years. That trickage is about 30 % since about 2009, 2010. But we do point out that at least one piece of this is the fact that some community colleges have been reclassified as four year institutions. And that's actually a little bit of a mistake to assume that every one of those campuses is no longer a two year or certificate pursuing kind of student. so.
We just point out that about a third of the apparent decline in community college enrollment is actually due to this technical issue. And so we should just be a little careful about what we're measuring in the data.
Jason Altmire (05:15)
Yeah, that's a very important consideration. think one of the most interesting findings, not just for me, but for any observer who's interested in this subject, was the relationship between the local unemployment rate and enrollment at community colleges and also in for-profit trade schools. Can you talk about
Joshua Goodman (05:38)
Yeah, so we are not the first people to observe this, but we wanted to do a really careful job of measuring the following fact, and that is if you just look over time over the last 20, 30, 40 years in the data, almost every time the U.S. goes into some kind of recession or has some kind of macroeconomic trouble, the unemployment rate goes up, you see that community college enrollment numbers go up pretty noticeably.
That's at a national level. And so what we did is we tried to connect data on community college enrollments and local labor market. So what's going on in your county in terms of the local unemployment rate. And we did this to try to put a pretty specific number on the following question. When unemployment in your county goes up by one percentage point, what happens to community college enrollment? And what we found was that a one percentage point rise in the unemployment rate leads to a 2 % increase in the community college enrollment rate.
likely because there's a set of people who say, when I can't find a decent job, I might as well go back to school because I don't have another better alternative right now. And that additional training might help me later down the road. So that's true of community colleges. It turns out it appears to be true of the for-profit sector as well, that when unemployment rates go up, enrollment in the for-profit sector also goes up. And that may be an indication that
there's at least some overlap between the populations who are thinking about community college as an option and for-profit colleges as an option.
Jason Altmire (07:09)
How would you characterize the demographics of that population?
Joshua Goodman (07:13)
We know that the community college and the for-profit sector student population are in general less likely to be traditionally aged college students. They're not necessarily starting college right at the end of high school. They might be in their 20s or even 30s, obviously even older, but on average they're probably in their 20s and 30s. They're likely to be a little bit lower income than the broader population, for example, of four-year college enrollees. They're more likely to be black or Hispanic.
And I think the results in our paper suggest they're more likely to be on the margin between choosing whether to go to college or to go get a job in the short run, which might be less true of what we think of as sort of typical four-year college enrollees who are often coming fairly straight out of high school and are probably just deciding to go to college, not making so many decisions about whether or not to take a job.
Jason Altmire (08:07)
And related to this correlation that exists between the unemployment rate locally and enrollment decisions of students, you found that students whose enrollment decisions are most sensitive to labor market conditions appear unlikely to have completed the degree, which I think is a really important consideration. Can you talk about that?
Joshua Goodman (08:30)
Yeah, so we started this project thinking about declining community college enrollments and trying to see if we could explain it. And so the really broad lesson we took away from this is it turns out the fact that the labor market has gotten generally much stronger than it was at the peak of the Great Recession in 2009, 2010, turns out to explain a lot of this decline in community college enrollment, the majority of it, as far as we can tell. But what's interesting is that we
don't see a corresponding decline in the number of degrees being completed at community colleges. And in fact, the of completion rates of the students who are on these campuses is if anything higher than it used to be. And we think the explanation for that is that the students who are on the margin between taking a job versus going to community college are by definition not super attached to the college experience.
And it turns out they were unlikely to have completed their degrees. And so it's an interesting question about whether we should be worried about this declining enrollment, because we tend to think that people should go to college only if they have a pretty high shot of completing their degree. Otherwise they can get into some economic trouble in terms of debt and not having a degree that helps them pay off that debt. So I think from the institution's perspective, from community colleges perspective, they care that they're losing students. makes a huge difference to their finances and their operations.
from a sort of society-wide perspective, it's not totally clear that we're losing too much if the students who are attending wouldn't have completed their degrees anyway. And so that's an interesting tension to think about.
Jason Altmire (10:12)
If I did the numbers correctly, certainly correct me please if I'm wrong, but it seemed that the 15 year period that you're talking about, which began in 2010, at the end of that 15 years of your study, there were 500,000 fewer first time enrollees at community colleges than there had been in 2010, which seems very significant.
how do you interpret that? First of all, was I right about that? And then how do you interpret?
Joshua Goodman (10:44)
Yeah, I think I'm just looking at one of the figures in our paper to remind me. It depends on exactly what you're looking at. But yeah, we are talking hundreds of thousands of fewer first time community college enrollees relative to the peak, which is in around 2009, 2010, depending on how you measure it, which your listeners may or may not remember wasn't the worst job market other than the weird first year of COVID, which was really strange.
2008, 2009, we had double digit unemployment rates, just absolutely atrocious labor markets. And you see this massive spike then in community college enrollments as people flee this terrible labor market to better educational options. And in some sense, the story of the last 15 years, or at least up until COVID struck, was really a story about
community colleges as well as somewhat for-profit colleges, having grown a ton at this terrible moment of the labor market and then slowly starting to shrink as the labor market recovered. And so the glass half full version of this is it's great that the labor market has recovered so much relative to that terrible moment, but it represents a real challenge for these institutions that might have gotten used to enrollment numbers that are not currently sustainable.
Jason Altmire (12:07)
I think it's important to think about the distinction between career oriented programs, especially at community colleges versus traditional education programs. Students are motivated differently. Those types of programs are different. Did you observe a difference related to those issues?
Joshua Goodman (12:28)
You know, it's a great question. So we can't, with any of these data sets that are available to researchers, study what program students are enrolled in. We can see if they earn their degrees, what degrees they're earning. In this paper, we didn't explore this in depth, although we do study differences between the community college sector and the for-profit sector and the four-year institutions. And I think some of your intuition is correct in that the
four-year sector, both private and public, does not exhibit the same kind of reaction to labor market conditions, to macroeconomic business cycles that the community colleges and the for-profits exhibit. So in other words, when the job market is bad, it turns out that doesn't have much of an effect on Boston University's enrollments or University of Michigan's enrollments or UT, University of Texas's enrollments. The students that it...
changes the enrollment decisions of are the ones who would have been going to community colleges and for-profit institutions. I think because of what you're suggesting, which is that one of the most common things they would be doing at these institutions is very career-oriented degree programs. And if there are good jobs out there, they might say, don't need to go get a degree that's career-oriented because I can just start making a career immediately. And when those jobs are not available,
They might say, OK, I need a way to get into the job market. And maybe one of these degrees will be that pathway.
Jason Altmire (13:57)
Have you in your research, either in this paper or in your prior experience, thought about or observed a difference or a comparison between for-profit trade schools, you know, the career programs and community colleges that are offering the same types of programs, skilled trades, maybe allied health, potentially beauty and wellness programs, IT, cybersecurity, those programs, do you know, is there a difference in student
Outcomes related to graduation job placement things like that upward mobility
Joshua Goodman (14:32)
That is a great question. The short answer is I'm not particularly expert in these topics. I will say that I have seen papers by other researchers that at least raise some concerns about the outcomes of students at some of the for-profit institutions. Again, it differs institution to institution. I think one of those concerns is about outcomes, like job market outcomes. The other is the value proposition. So community colleges are obviously
on average less expensive in part because they're subsidized directly by public appropriations. So I think some of the concerns that motivated policy changes like gainful employment regulations that have been sort of an interesting area of sort of bipartisan agreement that something should be done in this area, but it's not totally clear what. I think some of that is motivated by concerns about the value of different degree programs and the fact that maybe the
the government can play a role in directing students toward the programs that are more valuable. But there's still lot of disagreement about how best to measure that and how to implement those kind of regulations.
Jason Altmire (15:38)
I was going to ask you about that issue related to community college and public subsidies. And as you are aware, recently, some states have made community colleges free or almost free in many cases. So when you think about this declining enrollment that you're talking about and the fact that now in some of these states, community colleges are free, which means they're being reimbursed by the public, the taxpayer.
presumably except in Texas, which is outcomes based, but in most states based upon the number of students you have and the cost it takes to serve them. If there are fewer students, that would indicate there's less money going into those institutions. So is there a negative impact related to that dynamic on the quality or the innovation and the technology and the ability of the community college to serve those students?
Joshua Goodman (16:36)
Yeah, I know when I was talking about this issue a few years ago with a professional friend of mine who works in the Seattle, Washington area, he said that one way he thinks about it is that Seattle has three community colleges, but two thirds of the enrollment it had 10 or 15 years ago. And so one obvious solution to that is you close one of the community colleges and sort of concentrate your resources at the other two campuses. But we know that closing colleges is a
big step. It's very disruptive to the people involved. But I think the reason people are concerned about this declining enrollment is precisely that it raises difficult issues about what is the right way to take the fixed budget you have for higher education and use it most productively, whether it's concentrating on a small number of campuses or a smaller number of degree programs.
And so think you've seen a lot of systems struggle with either thinking about closing campuses or shutting down degree programs that have low enrollments or low demand. I will say here in Massachusetts, we've implemented some pretty broad ranging free community college programs. And there's no question if you look at the statistics that there's been a very sharp turnaround in community college enrollment as a result, almost certainly of that program. But those are programs right now, at least in our state, that are really focused on enrollments and not yet on the question of
are we supporting students to make sure that they actually succeed in completing their degrees? So I think that's going to be probably the next set of conversations that we have here, at least in the state where I am.
Jason Altmire (18:06)
In the paper that we're talking about, you didn't get into policy recommendations, but this is obviously your field of expertise. So I know you've thought about these issues based upon this and other research that you've done. What, are some of the policy recommendations you would ask legislators and regulators to think about?
Joshua Goodman (18:25)
I'll start by avoiding your question and then I'll actually, I'll give you a real answer. So the way I'm going to avoid your question is to say, one of the reasons we wrote this paper was that we had been posed this question by the previous presidential administration. How can we solve this declining community college enrollment problem? We are worried about the sector's health. What are the solutions to it? And as we started to do this analysis, we realized it's not totally clear that these declines are being driven by a problem.
because if a lot of these declines have to do with the fact that there's a good labor market out there, that's not a reason, we shouldn't be fighting the labor market, we should be celebrating that and be happy that people can get jobs without lengthening their educations. So part of the goal in writing this was to say, some of this declining enrollment is actually a very natural thing that we should expect when the economy is healthy. Now, that said, we also know that,
community colleges and colleges in general play a really important role, particularly when there are difficult economic times and people can't find jobs and want to go retrain or sort of upskill themselves. And so I would say if there's one policy recommendation that I would potentially make based on this research, it would be to think about funding post-secondary education in a way that has what macroeconomists might call automatic stabilizers. So for example,
we have a system of unemployment insurance that when the economy goes south and unemployment rates spike, a bunch of people who get thrown out of work, instead of being completely stripped of any income, they get payments through this unemployment insurance system, which softens the blow both to them, but also to the economy as a whole, because it keeps people spending money and not shutting down entirely. It actually would make sense potentially to do something like that for the funding of sectors like community colleges.
because we know that their enrollments go up in exactly the times when sort of economic conditions are rough. And so they need the most resources exactly when public budgets are tightest. And so if I were a state, I would think very hard about, or maybe even the federal government, think about how do you write funding mechanisms that strengthen the institutions at times when they need to be strengthened and pull back at times when they don't need the money as much.
Jason Altmire (20:50)
Since this is your expertise, the concept of with gainful employment type regulation appearing like it's going to come back post-graduate earnings being part of the calculation on the school's outcomes and effectiveness. If you look at the schools that fail that comparison to people that only have a high school diploma, the programs that fail, it's generally speaking the beauty and wellness programs.
medical assisting in some of the allied health professions, and then social work, special education, like a master's in special education at a private university. There are several of those programs that fail. And there's this national debate that is ongoing, which is right in your wheelhouse, I would think, related to the market responsibility, because a lot of these are very important, highly respected.
needed professions, but they don't pay a of money and their careers of passion. People want to go into those fields because they have an aptitude for it, but they have an interest and a passion for it. So what is the labor market's response going to be when these programs fail and schools are unable to offer them? They drop those programs and then the pipeline to the people who do that work.
is extinguished.
Joshua Goodman (22:20)
I think that's a great and a really tough question. work at an education school at Boston University that absolutely has a whole set of students and faculty who specialize in special education. ⁓ that issue hits very close to home here. I think it will involve tough conversations about there are some occupations where it's not clear whether the amount of training and licensure we require makes sense relative to the economic payoffs, that maybe we need to reduce
the barriers to entry to these professions. Cosmetology is one that comes up a lot as an example where the amount of money you have to spend to get those degrees often does not make sense in relation to the income stream that the person can get afterwards earning that degree. I think there are also professions, as you said, in health, in education, where these things are socially extremely valuable, but we just don't pay a lot for them. And we're going to have to have some tough conversations about
Eventually, we have to pay for them somehow. Either we're going to pay for them by subsidizing the loans that we give to students to do these degrees, and maybe those students will fail to pay back those loans, and we as taxpayers will just have to eat those costs. But that's a pretty bad situation because it's extraordinarily stressful for the individual student involved. It's sort of messy. Or maybe we come up with loan forgiveness programs that are targeted at specific kinds of professions that we think are underpaid.
or we work to actually change the pay scale for these professions. Or if we're not willing to do that, we admit that we don't think these things are so valuable and some of these programs just disappear. And I don't know what the right answer is, and it almost certainly differs on the program, but the thing that seems unfair is to encourage students to enroll in programs and take on potential debt if we know that the data predicts they're going to struggle to repay that. And so it's, think our sort of
public policy responsibility to design systems that either help them repay that debt in some way or prevent them from making that choice in the first place. And that's the tough decision we're going to have going forward.
Jason Altmire (24:29)
Well, this has been incredibly interesting and enlightening. Our guest has been Joshua Goodman from Boston University. Joshua, if somebody wanted to get in touch with you to continue the discussion or just learn more about your work, how would they do it?
Joshua Goodman (24:43)
I think the easiest way is to email me at edecjosh at bu.edu. So that's education economics Josh, EDEC Josh. All the other combinations of Jay Goodman were taken, so I couldn't do
Jason Altmire (24:59)
Let us know that's very appropriate. Joshua Goodman, thank you for being with us.
Joshua Goodman (25:03)
My pleasure, thanks for having me.
Jason Altmire (25:07)
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Career Education Report. Subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For more information, visit our website at career.org and follow us on Twitter @CECUED. That's at C-E-C-U-E-D. Thank you for listening.