On Their Own Terms: Two-Year Minority Serving Institutions

By: Thai-Huy Nguyen, Valerie Lundy-Wagner, Andrés Castro Samayoa, Marybeth Gasman, Audrey Wilson, Desmond Diggs, Melanie Wolff, Carolina Dávila, & William Boland | Center for Minority Serving Institutions, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania | February 2015

This report looks at the role of two-year Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) in improving postsecondary access and degree completion for disadvantaged students in the United States.

On Second Chances and Stratification: How Sociologists Think About Community Colleges

By: Lauren Schudde & Sara Goldrick-Rab | October 2014

This article provides an overview of sociology’s approach to understanding community colleges. The authors describe sociological theories, examine the contributions they make to the field, and discuss the discipline’s recent debates regarding community colleges. This article has been published in the Community College Review.

The Value of Postsecondary Credentials in the Labor Market: An Experimental Study

By: David Deming, Noam Yuchtman, Amira Abulafi, Claudia Goldin, & Lawrence F. Katz | October 2014

This paper assesses employers’ perceptions of postsecondary degrees from different types of institutions using a resume audit field experiment. The authors focus on various comparisons, including for-profit institutions versus public institutions and more-selective versus less-selective public-sector institutions. A version of this paper appears in the American Economic Review.