Associate and bachelor’s degree holders have similar earnings right after graduation, but the differences widen over time, research finds. Lawmakers have long pushed for more policies to hold colleges accountable for their graduates’ earnings. But which year they use to measure earnings can strongly impact how programs perform on accountability metrics, recent research from the Urban Institute found. “The later you measure earnings, the more accurate that might be as far as what the value of the credential was,” said Jason Cohn, research associate at Urban Institute and author of the analysis. “But on the other hand, measuring earnings later on allows programs to keep operating without really changing their practices.”
