Berevan Omer graduated on a Friday in February with an associate’s degree from Nashville State Community College and started work the following Monday in his new job as a computer-networking engineer at a local television station, making about $50,000 a year.
That’s 15 percent higher than the average starting salary for graduates not only from community colleges, but for bachelor’s degree holders from four-year universities.
“I have a buddy who got a four-year bachelor’s degree in accounting who’s making $10 an hour,” Omer says. “I’m making two and a half times more than he is.”
Omer, who is 24, is one of many newly minted graduates of community colleges defying history and stereotype by proving that a bachelor’s degree is not, as seems widely believed, the only ticket to a middle-class income.
Significant numbers of community-college grads are getting better jobs, and earning more at the start of their careers than people with bachelor’s degrees, a trend that surprises even the researchers who have noticed it in wage data that has started to become more available in the last year.
“There is that perception that the bachelor’s degree is the default, and, quite frankly, before we started this work showing the value of a technical associate’s degree, I would have said that too,” says Mark Schneider, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, which helped collect the numbers for some of the states that report them.
Omer’s friends with bachelor’s degrees “aren’t learning skills,” he says. “They’re just learning all this theory. I’ve got an applied degree. And I’m out there making a good amount of change.”
