Must Headlines Deceive?

A February 23, 2024, article in Diverse headlined “Growing Number of College Grads Earn Less Than the Typical High School Graduate” was based on a report from the HEA Group – a headline mirrored in other national media (including CBS MoneyWatch, Forbes, and the New York Times).  That report examined the median earnings of graduates from 3,887 US “higher ed institutions” and found that 74% of these graduated students who earned more than the estimated earnings of a typical high school graduate (26% did not – 1022 institutions). 

Unfortunately, the HEA report was fatally flawed and misleading, a typical example of research that starts with the headline and then produces an “analysis” to support it. It is also an example where the media fails to independently assess the accuracy of claims, instead accepting the words of Washington insiders (the author of the HEA report is a former administrative official in charge of the College Scorecard data on which the report was based).Dr. Dale Lehman

There are many problems with the HEA report but the most serious is that it fails to mention that only 1,657 of the 3,887 institutions are actually bachelor’s degree institutions (less than half). 1,363 are Certificate institutions (mostly beauty “colleges”) and 867 are community colleges.  Of the remaining 1,657 true four-year colleges, only 84 had graduates earning less than the typical high school graduate 10 years after graduation – 5% rather than the 26% cited in the study.

But the problems continue. These 84 colleges contain 31 that are in Puerto Rico, where median high school graduate wages are 43% of the rest of the country (and all have median graduate earnings greater than those of high school graduates in Puerto Rico), 21 are religious institutions (e.g., bible colleges, Yeshivas, etc.),  and 7 specialize in arts or music, leaving at most 25 true four-year “colleges” for which earnings are below those of the typical high school graduate (1.5% rather than the reported 26%).  The headline could have read: “Virtually All Colleges Have Median Earnings 10 years After Graduation that Are Greater Than Typical High School Graduate Earnings.”

Admittedly, that is a low bar – we should expect college graduate earnings to do better than that.  But why inflate the number to generate a headline and why is the media so willing to run with it without doing any independent analysis?  The data is available (the HEA Group did provide that) and not difficult to examine – which I did.