Key Takeaways
- The state’s higher education completion challenge, not its enrollment numbers, is a real obstacle to the Board of Regents’ goal that 60% of working-age adults hold a degree or high-value credential by 2030. It’s also an opportunity.
- The report’s regional retention and migration findings should spark intense debate. The report shows that state’s flagship STEM pipelines feed workers to other states.
- The current debate over the higher education funding formula should take a look at the career alignment findings from this report.
For a generation, higher education’s pitch to young people has been simple: get a bachelor’s degree, get a good job. A new Louisiana report complicates that message, and shows why we need to rethink how we talk about education and the workforce.
The report found that a young person who earns an instrumentation technology certificate at SOWELA Technical Community College in Lake Charles has better odds of reaching a six-figure income within five years than many graduates of four-year universities. That doesn’t mean a bachelor’s degree isn’t valuable. It means the path to a good job, and a good paycheck, isn’t always a four-year degree.
Based at UL Lafayette, the Blanco Public Policy Center’s second Louisiana’s Employment Outcomes (LEO) report offers the most detailed look yet at what happens to graduates of Louisiana’s public colleges and technical schools after they leave campus. “Linking Post Secondary Pathways to Post-Completion Employment” examines what students study, what they earn, what credentials they complete and even where they live five years later.
The report is part of LA FIRST, a legislatively directed research initiative that connects more than a decade of higher education completion records with state unemployment insurance wage data from 2014 through 2024. It gives Louisiana an unusually clear view of what happens when education meets the labor market.
The takeaway isn’t that one credential is better than another. It’s that the value of a credential depends on what it is, what students study, where they live and the path they take to get there. Students often take winding routes, earning multiple credentials along the way. Understanding those pathways, and the economic outcomes they produce, is essential if Louisiana wants to better connect education and workforce opportunities.
To help unpack the report, Better Louisiana compiled ten findings that we found most compelling, interesting, or surprising:
- Most students who start do not finish, and then they vanish from the data. Of the 1.2 million people who enrolled in a public Louisiana college or university since academic year 2010-11, only 39% ever completed a degree or credential at a public Louisiana college or university. That’s about 490,000 of the 1.2 million people who enrolled (Page 44 in the PDF version). For those who didn’t complete a degree (61%), they also don’t appear in the state’s employment two years after their brief enrollment (that is, employers who pay unemployment insurance). By year five that share grows to 75%, leaving the state with little visibility into what actually happens to most people who start college here (Page 46).
- Completion gaps by race are wide enough to look like a coin flip for some students. About half of White and Asian enrollees never complete a credential. That non-completion rate rises to about 70% for Black enrollees and enrollees of other races. (Page 45)
- The single most lucrative credential in the report is not a bachelor’s degree. Associate-level completers of Louisiana’s two engineering technology programs tied to the state’s manufacturing and energy corridor, instrumentation technology and industrial production technology, earn a median of $116,650 five years after completion. A certificate-diploma-associate sequence in industrial production technology reaches a median of $132,680, rivaling or beating nearly every bachelor’s degree program in the state. (Page 121-22)
- Curiously, that same standout program looks weak by the national “alignment” yardstick. Despite its exceptional pay and clear ties to manufacturing employers, engineering technology scores low on the standard national crosswalks used to judge whether a program “aligns” with the jobs its graduates hold, because those crosswalks were not built around Louisiana’s occupational mix. The report’s authors flag this directly as a case where the current measurement tool gives the wrong answer. (Page 128-29, 132)
- The gender pay gap is persistent, even in fields with a majority of female completers. Women’s median earnings five years after completion are 71% of men’s among certificate completers, 68% among associate completers, and 81% among bachelor’s completers, a gap driven in large part by men and women concentrating in different fields of study. But sorting is not the whole story: even within nursing itself, where women make up the large majority of completers, men earn more at every degree level, and male nurses are disproportionately concentrated in the higher-paying advanced credentials. (Page 99-102)
- Where a general studies certificate leads matters far more than the credential itself. Students who complete a general studies certificate and then continue directly into a second general studies associate degree earn a median of $39,210 five years later. Students who start at the identical point, a general studies certificate, but continue instead into a healthcare associate degree earn a median of $71,420, and those who continue into business earn $46,160. (Page 106)
- New Orleans keeps its own workforce in a way no other region does. Especially LSU graduates in Baton Rouge. 52% of the New Orleans region’s bachelor’s completers, and 59% of its associate and short-term completers, both attended a local high school and found local employment, the highest such rate of any Louisiana region. LSU’s flagship Baton Rouge campus, by contrast, graduates the highest percentage of Louisiana’s completers (32% overall) but the Capital Region retains only 31% of these completers for employment two years after graduation. (Page 76)
- The state’s highest earners are also its most likely to leave. Engineering, computer science, and other STEM bachelor’s degrees produce Louisiana’s best-paid graduates, but they also show the highest rates of out-of-state migration, approaching 70% of employed completers in some programs. Programs with lower starting pay, including healthcare, business, and education, retain workers in Louisiana at far higher rates. (Pages 66-67)
- “Job openings” and “job growth” often point in opposite directions, and openings favor low-wage work. Statewide, lower-wage occupations have far more projected annual openings than higher-wage occupations, largely because low-wage jobs turn over faster. Programs with the highest-paid completers tend to show below-average annual openings, even when their underlying labor market is projected to grow. The problem this could create is that any funding formula or accountability measure built around raw job openings counts would systematically favor lower-quality jobs. Registered nursing is a rare exception, combining high wages, strong growth, and abundant openings. (Page 140, 149)
- A handful of Louisiana’s most in-demand associate degrees were declining. Even in fields projected for above-average job growth, the number of completers has fallen. Associate degrees in industrial production technology dropped 45% and technical diplomas in practical and vocational nursing fell 41% over the period studied, despite strong wages and job growth in both fields. (Page 135, 143-44)
On balance, the report shows that the state’s completion challenges, not its enrollment numbers, is a real obstacle to the Board of Regents’ goal that 60% of working-age adults hold a degree or high-value credential by 2030. With 61% of enrollees never completing anything, closing Louisiana’s attainment gap requires retention and re-engagement strategies aimed at students already in the system.
The report’s alignment findings should also be discussed during the higher education funding formula debate that we recently covered and is now unfolding at the state level. Because the state’s best sub-baccalaureate program scores poorly on standard alignment measures, and because openings-based demand measures reward high-turnover, low-wage jobs, any Louisiana funding formula built on these tools risks penalizing programs the state should want to grow.
And crucially for a state trying to turn around its population growth, the report’s regional retention and migration findings should spark intense debate. The report shows that state’s flagship STEM pipelines feed workers to other states. Workforce policy aimed narrowly at STEM production without an in-state retention strategy may not deliver the local economic return policymakers expect.
We hope these 10 gems will whet the appetite for a deeper read of the full report. It’s online here. On the whole, these findings bear directly on three of Better Louisiana’s priorities: workforce, economic growth, and higher education.