If there’s been a villain in higher education over the past several years, it’s been for-profit colleges. Money-grubbing rip-off artists, they are! Meanwhile, their antithesis, at least conceptually, has been community colleges—cute, low-cost, community-based institutions. Yet according to the headline for a piece by New America’s Kevin Carey, the latter have been “underappreciated.” Is this true?

The basis for Carey’s hailing of community colleges is new federal reporting that improves on the old standard of tracking whether full-time, first-time students completed their program in the school where they started within 150 percent of expected time. The new info tracks students for eight years and includes data on completion and transfers.