Does that mean for-profits are moving up in the world, or just that community colleges have that bad of a reputation? Paul Fain at Inside Higher Ed reports:

Community colleges and for-profits fare similarly in new study of employer responses

In the debate over the value of attending a for-profit college, the rubber hits the road in corporate human resources departments. And now, for the first time, researchers have looked at how employers respond when for-profits are listed on a résumé.

The newly released working paper by five economists tracked callbacks by employers in response to 8,914 fictitious job applications. It measured how young holders of certificates and associate degrees from for-profits fared in comparison to holders of the same credentials from community colleges.

The research found no statistically significant difference in how the two sectors stacked up.

An interpretation of those results, however, depends on who you ask.

Employers’ overall response rate — meaning a positive, non-perfunctory reply via phone or e-mail — was 11.6 percent for applications that listed community colleges compared to 11.3 percent for those that listed for-profits. Likewise, the split for interview requests was tilted slightly in community colleges’ favor, at 5.3 percent versus 4.7 percent. Those splits fell well within the study’s margin of error.

To the five researchers who conducted the study, the primary takeaway is that for-profits are a worse investment.

“Our results provide no indication that résumés that list for-profit college credentials generate more employer interest than those that list community college credentials,” they wrote. “If anything, the opposite may be true.”