The Postsecondary Commission (PSC) is an accreditor of outcomes-focused, innovative institutions of higher education. For more information, please see PSC's website.

In parallel with its work as an accreditor, PSC conducts and publishes for public use studies of the value-added earnings (VAE) outcomes that students experience from enrolling in postsecondary institutions and programs.

The study that PSC publishes here is part of its wider research program. Over the next several years, PSC expects to repeat its study in Texas and to conduct similar statewide studies of students’ value-added earnings outcomes in other states. 

PSC is also working with national data sets to model, to the extent possible given their limitations, students’ value-added earnings outcomes in all institutions in the US.

To help undertake its study of value-added earnings outcomes in Texas, PSC worked with a team of talented economists, programmers, and other staff at Mathematica. 

PSC is particularly grateful to Jonah Deutsch, Whitney Kozakowski, Naihobe Gonzalez, and Jessica Wagner for their work on this study and for serving as the principal authors of Mathematica’s technical report for the study.

Download Mathematica’s full study report: Measuring the Economic Returns to Postsecondary Education at Scale.

PSC is grateful to the leadership and staff at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) and the Education Research Center (ERC) at the University of Houston for granting PSC access to the data that made this study possible and for supporting PSC and Mathematica’s work on this study.

Contact PSC using the form on its website.