Scaling up community college baccalaureates in Washington State: Labor market outcomes and equity implications for higher education
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Community and technical colleges in Washington state were early adopters in the growing trend to offer bachelor’s degrees, actively expanding these degrees over the last 15 years. This study describes the evolving state policy landscape on community college baccalaureate (CCB) degrees in Washington in certain programs previously classified as terminal career-technical education and assesses labor market outcomes for graduates of three high-demand program areas conferring these degrees. Comparing bachelor’s graduates of community colleges to regional university graduates, CCB graduates demonstrated slightly higher employment and earnings in the first quarter post-graduation. However, university graduates caught up to approximately the same or slightly higher earnings as CCB graduates by three years post-graduation. Differences in age and prior work experience of graduates in the two groups may help explain these findings but variation in employment and earnings by gender and race were persistent for both groups, with pronounced disparities for female and some racially minoritized graduates. These findings can inform state policy on baccalaureate attainment, CCB degrees as well as university bachelor’s degrees, to help address inequities in higher education. Future studies evaluating the effects of college degrees on employment and earnings may also be enriched by these results.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it