What For-Profit Colleges Can Teach Us: Meet Economics PhD Student Ryan Haygood
What would it take for public colleges to serve students better? Sitting at the intersection of labor economics and industrial organization, PhD student Ryan Haygood’s research examines education markets and how colleges help or hinder students who arrive with very different levels of preparation, goals, and constraints.
Focusing on students on the margins of higher education, much of Haygood’s recent research centers on the two-year for-profit sector and how it compares with public community colleges. For many observers, for-profit colleges are known primarily for high tuition, heavy debt burdens, and a history of predatory recruiting—well-documented and important problems at many for-profit institutions. Why, then, do these colleges continue to attract and graduate students, and what might that reveal about gaps in the public sector?
“The main thing I’m focused on right now is answering: what might we be able to learn from for-profit colleges, and how can the public sector better serve students on the margins of higher education?” Haygood said.
The For-Profit Puzzle
As a second-year PhD student, he read a paper and came across a table comparing public and for-profit two-year college graduation rates. The gap was so large that he assumed it had to be a mistake. “No research I knew of had studied this,” he said. “I just thought it was a typo.”
For-profit colleges have a lackluster reputation, yet here was one dimension where they appeared to dramatically outperform public alternatives.
Haygood’s current research suggests the answer is not that for-profits enroll stronger students, but rather the sector is better matched to students who are more vocationally focused, and looking for a narrower, faster path to a credential. Community colleges, by contrast, are often designed to keep more options open. They can prepare students to transfer to four-year colleges and require more general coursework along the way. For many students, that breadth is valuable. For others, especially those who arrive underprepared and simply want to complete a vocational program, those same requirements can become barriers.
“It’s the students who come in with the lowest academic preparation who do the worst at community colleges,” Haygood said. “Yet these types of students still graduate at high rates from for-profits.”
Students with stronger preparation and broader ambitions may be better served by community colleges, yet for students seeking a more direct vocational path, public colleges may not always offer the structure or programs they want. Haygood’s findings show that the graduation gap is not simply a sorting story, where stronger or more motivated students select into for-profits. The gap persists even when comparing similar programs in the same field and of the same duration. He was also surprised to find that for-profit degrees still seem to carry meaningful labor-market value for those who graduate. That pushed him away from a simple “diploma mill” explanation and toward a different one: that for-profits offer a narrower path, with fewer academic demands, that is better matched to some students’ skills and preparation.
“There seems to be a mismatch between the technical vocational programs that are offered by public colleges and the programs that are really demanded by these types of students,” he said.
What Happens When For-Profits Close
In a working paper titled “Can Public Colleges Cater to For-Profit Students?” Haygood studies what happens when for-profit college chains abruptly close. He analyzes where displaced students go next, and what those choices reveal about the role for-profits play in the broader higher education market.
The paper finds that between 30 and 50 percent of for-profit students substitute to public colleges after closures. But many of those students shift from full-time to part-time enrollment, slowing their progress toward a degree. The paper also shows that substitution is much stronger when public colleges offer vocational programs similar to those students had been seeking at for-profits. When community colleges introduce overlapping programs, for-profit enrollment in those same fields drops sharply. These patterns show that enrollment choices are shaped not only by for-profits’ heavier advertising, but also by concrete features including the availability of programs students want to study.
Taken together, the findings reinforce a broader theme in Haygood’s work: students’ choices can reveal where the public sector is not fully meeting demand. For-profit colleges may often be lower-value options on average, but they can also succeed in serving some students whose needs are not well matched by traditional public-college pathways.
From Early Interventions to Higher Education
Haygood first came to economics as an undergraduate at Yale, and his coursework in Quantitative Policy Evaluation convinced him that the field was uniquely equipped to address the policy questions that motivated him. Seeing how clear conceptual models combined with empirical evidence could aid the design of public policy laid the foundation for him to become an economist.
The turn toward education came through undergraduate research on an early childhood intervention. The evidence on those programs was striking: well-designed interventions at young ages can produce gains that persist for decades. But for Haygood, that also pointed to a later design challenge for higher education: how can colleges serve all students well when earlier investments have produced wide differences in preparation, aptitudes, and goals? That question led him toward the part of higher education he studies now: open-access institutions serving students with especially varied circumstances.
Haygood has spent most of his adult life at Yale, first as an undergraduate and now as a doctoral student. He said one of the most valuable parts of the PhD experience has been the way faculty and students engage seriously with research at every stage. He pointed in particular to the department’s weekly labor economics breakfast, where students workshop early-stage ideas with faculty and peers. “The faculty are really present, and extremely willing to engage with both early and advanced research,” he said. “I’ve been really struck by how generous they are with their time.”
He also credited advisors Joe Altonji and John Eric Humphries, describing them as unusually good at “seeing around corners” in his research, and anticipating the next challenge in a project before he has fully gotten there himself.
Haygood ultimately hopes his research can help clarify how high-value vocational programs can be made more accessible and better matched to the students who need them most. More broadly, his work asks what public institutions can learn from the students who keep turning elsewhere, and what it would take to serve them better.