Introduction and Context

In the late 1990s, Florida had one of the lowest rates of baccalaureate degree attainment per capita in the nation. The state legislature began exploring ways to help more Floridians earn a bachelor’s degree. One strategy was authorizing community colleges to confer limited bachelor’s degrees, expanding access to affordable and local opportunities to pursue further education. In 2001, the state legislature passed a bill changing St. Petersburg Community College to St. Petersburg College and allowing the institution to begin conferring bachelor’s degrees in nursing, education, and applied sciences.

There were good reasons for Florida leaders to consider increasing bachelor’s degree attainment an urgent priority. Earning a bachelor’s degree carries a litany of benefits, which are especially useful in difficult economic times. Americans with a bachelor’s degree make, on average, approximately $19,000 more per year than those with an associate degree.¹ Bachelor’s degree holders, especially Millennials, are also less likely to be unemployed than peers who only have some college experience or an associate degree.² In the recovery from the Great Recession, new jobs that emerged were much more likely to require a bachelor’s degree than the jobs that were lost.³ We are likely to observe a similar pattern once we emerge from the current pandemic-induced recession, meaning that Americans will need more opportunities to earn a bachelor’s degree. Even beyond the much-needed economic benefits of the degree, people with bachelor’s degrees are more likely than those with only an associate degree to report being in excellent health, voting frequently, and volunteering.⁴

Florida’s approach to increasing bachelor’s degree attainment by relying on community colleges was unusual – and may hold valuable lessons for other states that share the same goal. To distill lessons for other states and institutions, we need to better understand if Florida’s community college baccalaureate strategy is reaching students who may not be likely to earn a bachelor’s degree without these opportunities. We also need to know more about how well CCB graduates secured or maintained employment and whether they were earning good wages after completing their programs. A clearer picture of CCB graduates’ outcomes can help community colleges, like those throughout Florida, help people adapt to changes in the local and national labor market and enhance their quality of life by offering affordable bachelor’s degrees as part of an economic recovery strategy.

In this report, I explore demographic characteristics and labor market outcomes of baccalaureate graduates from the Florida College System and compare them to associate degree graduates in similar fields. Better understanding of who CCB graduates are—including how they may differ from other students—and whether they reap better economic rewards than associate degree graduates will shed light on the value these programs bring to equity, access, and attainment conversations. Using state data on three cohorts of graduates, I analyze disaggregated data by race, age group, and gender. The three main sections of this analysis focus on the demographics of graduates in the sample and how they compare to the population of Florida, rates at which graduates are employed or pursue further education, and graduates’ wages. This research provides additional data on the outcomes of community college baccalaureate degrees for graduates, which can in turn inform state policy to support and target these types of degree programs.