Scene 7 of 19, Former students of for-profit colleges earn the least a decade after entry. Step 1 of 2, Each college once.
Colleges with a published earnings value
Former students of for-profit colleges earn the least a decade after entry At the median for-profit college, former students' median earnings a decade after entry were $28,330, against $42,014 at the median public college and $53,848 at the median private nonprofit college
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 Median earnings of former students a decade after entry (thousands of 2022 dollars) Public Private nonprofit For-profit Step 1 of 2 · Each college once
Each curve is the distribution of the colleges in a sector by the median earnings of their former students a decade after entry, each college counted once.
Notes, source and chapter
Scenes
Former students of for-profit colleges earn the least a decade after entry Scene 7 of 19, step 1 of 2: Each college once. Colleges with a published earnings value.
What to say These are distributions of college-level summaries, not of individual earnings. The four-year and short-program views are in the chapter for anyone who wants them.
About the chart At the median for-profit college, former students' median earnings a decade after entry were $28,330, against $42,014 at the median public college and $53,848 at the median private nonprofit college
The for-profit ridge sits left of the public and private nonprofit ridges, and the private nonprofit ridge reaches furthest right. Each ridge is a smoothed density of college medians scaled to its own peak, so height shows shape and not the number of colleges; the sector medians in the title count each college once, and their 95% intervals, from a bootstrap over states, are in the text.
Earnings are the median for students who received federal aid and were working and not enrolled a decade after entry. They are in 2022 dollars, and the Scorecard adds noise to them and withholds them for small groups, so a college with no published value is missing, never zero. Densities use one smoothing bandwidth for every ridge and run from zero to a ceiling; a few colleges above the ceiling are outside the plot. Colleges are institutions identified by a 6-digit OPE ID. Branch campuses repeat their parent's earnings, so one row per OPE ID is used, and 5,000 institutions are in the file in the 50 states and DC. Earnings are published for 3,963 of them, and the share with no value is 4.7% of public, 26.5% of private nonprofit and 33.2% of for-profit colleges. The medians describe colleges and the students who received federal aid, and they mix what a college does with who enrolls and where it sits. Source College Scorecard, most recent cohorts, May 2025 release (earnings of the 2009-2011 entering classes, 2022 dollars); unweighted unless the view says weighted by undergraduate enrollment
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