Interesting Reads This Week
It's becoming more clear that we viable pathways to employment are becoming more important than access, or completion, or accountability.
Glenda Morgan
April 04, 2026
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I want to do something a bit different than the usual this week.
Yesterday I wrote about how our approaches to accountability often attribute outcomes to institutions and programs, when in reality those outcomes are shaped by the pathways students move through after they leave them.
It may be a case of my having a hammer and now seeing nails everywhere, but this week I kept seeing that same issue from multiple angles in the many, many reports I read. A clearer pattern began to emerge: increasingly, the challenge in higher education is not access to education—or even completion. It is the structure, alignment, and stability of the pathways that connect education to outcomes.
And those pathways are not just uneven. They are conditional. They can fail. And in some cases, they may be starting to disappear.
Pathways aren’t equal
A new paper from the NBER looks at a growing but still under-examined pathway: bachelor’s degrees awarded by community colleges (CCBs). As the authors note, this is no longer a niche phenomenon.
To date, 24 states allow community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees [snip], and the number of colleges awarding these degrees has grown tremendously [snip]. Between 2004 and 2022, the share of community colleges
offering bachelor’s degrees increased from 2.1% to 16.5% and the number of degrees awarded more than quadrupled, from 3,327 to 16,059. While they still account for a small share of all bachelor’s degrees awarded nationally (approximately 0.8 percent in 2022), the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded by community colleges is large and growing [snip] For example, in Florida and Washington, close to 9.5% and 5.3% of BAs were awarded by community colleges in 2022, respectively.
Using administrative data from the Postsecondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) dataset, the authors compare earnings across three credentials: associate degrees, community college bachelor’s degrees, and traditional bachelor’s degrees.
At a high level, the results look straightforward.
Using administrative data and controlling for institution and field, we find that CCB graduates earn $4,000 to $9,000 more annually than Associate’s (AA) degree holders one year after graduation but experience average earnings penalties of roughly $2,000 relative to traditional Bachelor’s (BA) recipients.
This makes CCBs look like a neat “middle step”—a credential that sits between an associate degree and a traditional bachelor’s in both cost and earnings. But that simple story breaks down quickly once you look more closely. What matters is not the degree, it’s the pathway.
In some fields—nursing and criminal justice, for example—these programs function as relatively tight pipelines into specific occupations. Outcomes are predictable, and CCB graduates can earn as much as, or even more than, their peers from traditional four-year institutions.
In others—business, agriculture, and computer and information sciences—pathways are far more diffuse. Graduates disperse across a wide range of industries, and earnings outcomes vary widely. In these cases, CCB graduates tend to earn less than those with traditional bachelor’s degrees, and sometimes little more than those with associate degrees.
