Lawmakers have long pushed for more policies to hold colleges accountable for their graduates’ earnings. But which year they use to measure earnings can strongly impact how programs perform on accountability metrics, recent research from the Urban Institute found.
“The later you measure earnings, the more accurate that might be as far as what the value of the credential was,” said Jason Cohn, research associate at Urban Institute and author of the analysis. “But on the other hand, measuring earnings later on allows programs to keep operating without really changing their practices.”
Cohn used data from the U.S. Department of Education and the Census to look at earnings over a lifetime. He found that graduates’ earnings grow quickly in the early years after they earn their credentials, then begin to flatten.
Graduates with associate degrees have the fastest initial growth, but that slows relatively soon. In the first year after graduation, those students earn on average $43,000. That’s only slightly lower than what bachelor’s degree holders average in the first year — $45,000 or $49,000 , depending on the data source.
But the difference becomes more pronounced with time.
“When you project out and look maybe five, ten years down the line, there ends up being a pretty big gap,” Cohn said.
In the fifth year after graduation, associate degree holders average $49,000, while bachelor’s degree holders make more than $60,000.
Both groups slow their earnings growth from there. Associate degree holders grow their earnings at about 3% per year before leveling off at about $62,000 in year 13.
Meanwhile, earnings for bachelor’s degree holders grow between 2% to 8% per year. They also level out 13 years after graduation, but at $91,000. Earnings eventually reach $110,000 after 25 years post-graduation.
Master’s degree holders had the most consistent earnings growth of the credentials in the analysis. That means that the year policymakers choose to measure earnings for master’s degree students may not matter as much as for other degrees.
Earnings grow slower for master’s degree holders than for their undergraduate peers. On average, they make between $74,000 and $82,000 in the first year after graduation, which rises to $103,000 after six years. Then earnings grow only 1% per year. They reach $133,000 after 25 years.
Professional degree holders, such as doctors, lawyers and dentists, see their earnings begin to slow significantly later than graduates with other credentials — after 10 years versus five years for undergraduate programs. Cohn said that may be because of residency requirements in fields like medicine, which keep earnings low in the first years after graduation.
Earnings for professional degree holders are about $85,000 in the first year, rising to $187,000 after ten years. Their earnings peak after 22 years, reaching $216,000.
Tracking earnings long term is important because first-year earnings aren’t representative of the growth graduates might see over their careers, Cohn said. But measuring earnings five years out, when they're a stronger indicator of what graduates will make, has its own tradeoffs.
“That's a long time for a program to be operating without kind of having data on their performance and any possible associated consequences,” Cohn said.
How the second Trump administration will approach accountability is still up in the air. The U.S. Department of Education during President Donald Trump’s first term did away with some accountability policies related to earnings, including the Obama-era gainful employment regulations, which aimed to cut off federal funding to poorly performing career education programs. But Cohn said the push is larger than just one party.
“We can look at the last few years and see that there's been a lot of appetite for higher accountability in both major parties,” he said. “There's been proposals from both sides in Congress for various ways to do that.”
