Aug 19, 2014 11:57 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A new report has found that graduates from for-profit colleges like ITT Tech and the University of Phoenix are not any better suited in the job market than their peers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the new paper from National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (NCALDER) suggests such graduates do not do much worse either. Instead of tracking employment outcomes, the researchers measured employers' initial interest in a candidate, based on their education.

For-profit colleges are under a harsh lens thanks to Corinthian Colleges, a system that recently shut down. For-profit institutions tend to charge more for comparable programs that can be found at community colleges. Corinthian was accused of generating false enrollment, graduation and job market stats to attract applicants, while burying students in loan debt.

According to Inside Higher Ed, five economists authored the NCALDER paper and tracked employers' callbacks from 8,914 false job applications. The experiment was meant to compare the results between for-profit colleges and community colleges.

"Our results provide no indication that résumés that list for-profit college credentials generate more employer interest than those that list community college credentials," the researchers wrote. "If anything, the opposite may be true."

The study authors reported that 11.6 of the community college applications warranted a positive reply via phone or email, compared to 11.3 percent of the for-profit applications.

"It is more expensive to attend for-profit colleges," study co-author Cory Koedel, an economist at the University of Missouri at Columbia, told Inside Higher Ed. "If you had to make a bet, you'd bet on community college doing better."

The researchers also found that 5.3 percent of the community college applications received requests for a formal interview, compared with 4.7 percent of the for-profit college applications. Comparatively, high school diploma holders received replies at a 10.6 percent rate and 4.2 percent of the applications garnered interview offers.

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