Examining the Earnings Trajectories of Community College Students Using a Piecewise Growth Curve Modeling Approach

Policymakers have become increasingly concerned with measuring-and holding colleges accountable for-students' labor market outcomes. In this article we introduce a piecewise growth curve approach to analyzing community college students' labor market outcomes, and we discuss how this approach differs from two popular econometric approaches: Mincerian and individual fixed-effects models. Our results suggest that three assumptions underpinning econometric approaches-that across-student variation is constant across time, that the model specifies a counterfactual that is appropriate for all members of the sample, and that the impacts of a given award are fixed across time-may not be well founded. We then highlight how insights gained from the growth curve approach can be used to strengthen evolving econometric analyses of labor market returns.