Selling a Better Future for Profit: Examining the Prospects of “Good Jobs” for Graduates of For-Profit Colleges

This research uses longitudinal data from The Beginning Postsecondary Survey 2003-2009 to compare short-term job quality outcomes between for-profit college graduates with an associate’s degree and graduates with the same degree from a non-profit college. While previous research comparing for-profit college graduates with more traditional graduates examined mostly financial and income related outcomes (Lang and Weinstein 2012; Deming, Goldin, and Katz 2012), we include holistic measures of job quality including: job benefits, job satisfaction, and relevance of respondent’s degree to their job. Results showed that for-profit graduates were more likely to be offered health insurance from their employer, but the same graduates were also likely to be working at a job that was the same or like their job prior to graduation. For-profit graduates were also less likely to see their degree as helping their career

Relationships with God among Young Adults: Validating a Measurement Model with Four Dimensions

Experiencing a relationship with God is widely acknowledged as an important aspect of personal religiosity for both affiliated and unaffiliated young adults, but surprisingly few attempts have been made to develop measures appropriate to its latent, multidimensional quality. This paper presents a new model for measuring relationships with God based on religious role theory, attachment to God theory, and insights from interview-based studies, which allows for a wider array of dimensions than have been considered in prior work: anger, anxiety, intimacy, and consistency. To test our model's internal validity, we use confirmatory factor analysis with nationally representative data. To test its external validity, we (1) use difference-in-means tests across gender, race/ethnicity, geographical region, and religious affiliation; and (2) analyze correlations between our four new dimensions and four other commonly used measures of religiosity, thereby demonstrating both our model's validity and value for future studies of personal religiosity

Limitations of Fixed-Effects Models for Panel Data

Although fixed-effects models for panel data are now widely recognized as powerful tools for longitudinal data analysis, the limitations of these models are not well known. We provide a critical discussion of 12 limitations, including a culture of omission, low statistical power, limited external validity, restricted time periods, measurement error, time invariance, undefined variables, unobserved heterogeneity, erroneous causal inferences, imprecise interpretations of coefficients, imprudent comparisons with cross-sectional models, and questionable contributions vis-à-vis previous work. Instead of discouraging the use of fixed-effects models, we encourage more critical applications of this rigorous and promising methodology. The most important deficiencies—Type II errors, biased coefficients and imprecise standard errors, misleading p values, misguided causal claims, and various theoretical concerns—should be weighed against the likely presence of unobserved heterogeneity in other regression models. Ultimately, we must do a better job of communicating the pitfalls of fixed-effects models to our colleagues and students