Thus far, my empirical approach does not allow earnings
or employment gains due to community college attendance
to vary over time. To allow for a transition period after school
exit, I follow Jacobson et al. (2005) and include a set of interactions between credit/credential receipt and the reciprocal
of the number of quarters since college exit. In the long-run,
this term goes to zero; thus the long-run impact of credit and
credential receipt will be approximated by the coefficient
on the main effect of credits and credentials.21 As shown in
column 1 of Table 5, although community college students
do experience a marginally significant increase in earnings
as they transition from college to the labor force, I find little
evidence that the long-run impacts of credits and credentials
vary substantially from the earnings gains experienced