Are Community College Students Increasingly Choosing High-Paying Fields of Study? Evidence from Massachusetts

The labor-market payoff to workers with associate degrees in healthcare and STEM occupations is very high in Massachusetts. We examine whether this induced a growing proportion of students in MA community colleges (MACCs) to earn an associate degree (AD) in one of these fields. We do this by using multinomial logit analysis to compare trends across 12 cohorts of MACC entrants in the proportion of students who earned an AD in a healthcare or STEM program within six years of entry.

We find a substantial increase across cohorts in the proportion of students who earned an AD in a STEM program, but not in the proportion who earned an AD in a healthcare program. We found differences in degree attainment by student gender, race/ethnicity, family income, and 10th-grade mathematics score. Interviews with MACC program leaders revealed that supply constraints hinder expansion of many healthcare AD programs, but not STEM programs.