Does it pay to attend a for-profit college? Vertical and horizontal stratification in higher education

•I examine hourly wage returns of attending a for-profit college with NLSY97 data.•Ordinary Least Squares and propensity score matching models are used.•For-profit 2-year degree holders earn no more than high school graduates.•For-profit 2-year degree holders earn less than nonprofit attendees.•For-profit and nonprofit 4-year degree holders earn about the same. Despite the recent growth of for-profit colleges, scholars are only beginning to understand the labor market consequences of attending these institutions. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, I find that for-profit associate’s degree holders encounter lower hourly earnings than associate’s degree holders educated at public or private, nonprofit colleges, and earnings that are not significantly different than high school graduates. However, individuals who complete a bachelor’s degree by attending college in either the for-profit or nonprofit sectors encounter positive returns. These findings, robust to model selection, suggest that the distinction between for-profit and nonprofit colleges constitutes an important axis in the horizontal dimension of education at the sub-baccalaureate level, and complicate notions of vertical stratification such that higher levels of educational attainment do not necessarily guarantee a wage premium.