Food Deserts, Community Colleges And Innovative Slackers
New research by Ann Stevens, Michal Kurlaender and Michel Grosz is cited in FiveThirtyEight

FiveThirtyEight, May 6, 2015

Every Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit organization made up of some of North America’s most respected economists, releases its latest batch of working papers. The papers aren’t peer-reviewed, so their conclusions are preliminary (and occasionally flat-out wrong). But they offer an early peek into some of the research that will shape economic thinking in the years ahead. Here are a few of this week’s most interesting papers.

Title: “Career Technical Education and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from California Community Colleges”

Authors: Ann Huff Stevens, Michal Kurlaender, Michel Grosz

What they found: Vocational education at community colleges — that is, programs geared toward a specific skill — can generate large increases in earnings for students, especially for those trained for health occupations.