Photo: Adam Cohn/ Flickr

If you want to go to college, try community college. Try public college. Try the school of hard knocks. Do not, however, pay money for a degree from an online, for-profit school. Studies say: no!!!

A new study in the American Economic Review examines the question: These degrees—are they worth a shit, or nah? Researchers applied to a variety of entry-level jobs with fictitious resumes that were identical except for the schools that the applicants had degrees from. Some were public colleges, some were regular for-profit schools, and some were online for-profit schools. The results: applicants with degrees from regular, brick-and-mortar colleges got 10% fewer callbacks than those with degrees from public colleges; and applicants with degrees from online for-profit schools got 25% fewer callbacks than those from public colleges.

“In many cases,” the study notes, “a for-profit associate’s degree did not result in higher call back rates than for applicants with no college experience listed at all.”

Would you like these researchers to put in terms that even a moron child can understand? Okay!!! They will! “[Because] yearly tuition at a for-profit college typically greatly exceeds that at a public university and for-profit degrees seem to be less valued by employers, the for-profit degree appears to be the less attractive investment.

Yeah no shit.

[The study]