One of the biggest targets for progressive education elites is “for profit” institutions – as if profit was a bad thing.

Now, a working paper that stung for-profits has been revised: Now it declares roughly equal job-market returns of credentials earned at for-profits versus nonprofit colleges.

Paul Fain of Inside Higher Ed has more information on this rather significant change.

The final result is a toss-up in a study comparing how for-profit and nonprofit colleges stack up in job market returns of their certificates and associate degrees. That finding is a big shift from the unflattering conclusion about for-profits reached in an earlier version of the paper.

The National Bureau of Economic Research released both iterations of the study, which was written by Kevin Lang and Russell Weinstein, two professors of economics at Boston University. A “working” version of the research went live last summer. It found “large, statistically significant benefits from obtaining certificates/degrees from public and not-for-profit but not from for-profit institutions.”

Working papers, however, are works in progress. Researchers get feedback during the peer review process that can lead to revisions and improvements. That’s what happened with Lang and Weinstein’s study.

The two economists, who were not available for comment, apparently tweaked their methodology and came to a different conclusion about the relative value of credentials earned at for-profits.

“We find no statistically significant differential return to certificates or associates degrees between for-profits and not-for-profits,” they wrote in the paper, which was released last month.

Certificate holders from for-profits tended to fare slightly worse in the job market, according to the study, while associate degrees from for-profits were worth slightly more than those from nonprofit institutions. Hence no clear winner emerged.