College Value Is More Than Wages, New Study Aims To Show

Forbes

22-07-2025

Community college building entrance.
Students and their families often view college value in stark terms –whether it provides a return on investment. And with the high cost of attending college it is reasonable that we make sure college students earn enough after graduation to pay back loans they take out, or to make the time they spent in college rather than working, worth it.
However, colleges provide vast benefits that extend beyond individual wages and employability that are harder to measure than an individual student's income a few years after they graduate. To help make the broader benefits more concrete, The Urban Institute, a Washington, DC-based research center, piloted a project aimed at helping community colleges talk about the value they bring to their communities in new and nuanced ways.
The project is intended to provide colleges with new ways to demonstrate the broad social and economic benefits that colleges provide for the communities they are located in. Titled Colleges Contributing Value to Communities, the work seems particularly salient at a time when higher education is under attack.
How Are Community Colleges Thinking About Value Beyond Earnings?
For the pilot, Urban brought together senior leaders from seven community colleges to evaluate new ways of thinking about, measuring and communicating the value that community colleges provide where they are located. Community colleges enroll 39% of American undergraduate students, and are very effective at promoting social and economic mobility, as demonstrated by work exploring community college's economic development impact by researchers at Harvard.
The aim of Urban's pilot project was to develop measures of value that go beyond whether students were graduating and finding jobs that paid them a decent wage. The early examples that participating colleges created show the broad range of positive community impacts provided by community colleges.
Most community colleges receive significant funding from local property taxes, so finding new ways to show how those funding streams benefit more than just students could help grow support for these institutions that often serve as community hubs.
Why Does College Value Matter?
The challenge Urban is trying to address is this: it is simpler to calculate whether one student graduates and earns enough money to pay back their loans, than it is to figure out all the different benefits colleges provide for their local communities.
Individual benefits are important, but historically higher education, especially public higher education, has been seen as a public good—providing far reaching benefits—that exceed the individual returns, like increased earnings, and higher employability enjoyed by college graduates. Approximately 70% of American undergraduate students attend a public college or university.
Given that context, finding ways to measure the value of colleges to their wider communities and the country is just as valuable as gauging how well individual students do after graduation.
Kelsey noted that one of the goals of the project was to find ways for community colleges to show how they improve their local communities in ways that benefit people who are not enrolled, as much as they benefit students.
Some of the college presidents Urban worked with focused on creating criteria centered around economic development, but at a broader level, considering the ways community colleges serve as hubs for training to meet local and regional workforce needs. Other criteria were intended to measure the ways community colleges have increasingly become social service providers, helping to provide childcare, connect students with public benefits, and running health clinics for their communities
Kelsey highlighted the reality that, 'Higher ed institutions do so much more for their communities that most people realize - and those benefits can go to everyone, not just those who enroll or work at the college. It's a place to vote, a place for cultural enrichment, a place to get a vaccine in a pandemic, to seek safety in a disaster, and much more.'
What Do Most Americans Think About College Value?
Urban's approach is in line with how most Americans view college. Eighty eight percent of Americans think that colleges should provide support to the community they are located in, as well as provide workers for the economy, according to the latest Varying Degrees report, a nationally representative survey from New America, that assesses how Americans value higher education.
In addition to the social services that many community colleges provide, there was a focus on public safety and improving connection as dual benefits to the community. With one community college working to find ways to show that more training and education meant lower crime rates in the area, and another finding metrics to gauge improvements in mental health and social connections.
As support for higher education has become increasingly politicized, efforts like Urban's might be one way that colleges can demonstrate the diverse types of value they bring to their communities, to insulate themselves from political attacks.
Kelsey hopes that, 'A decade from now… college leaders have the teams, strategies, partnerships, skills, and data to be able to demonstrate all the different ways they provide value to their communities such that we swing the pendulum back from public divestment in higher educating to re-investing in it and our future. I don't want to overstate my case, but my personal view is our country's long-term success may well depend on it.'