TEACH THEM SKILLS:

JASMINE GAO, who is 19, just wasn't the classroom type. So instead of languishing in college, she dropped out after her freshman year.

Ms. Gao decided that she didn't want to continue studying at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. At first she considered transferring to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, but she changed her mind when she saw that her tuition bill would be around $44,000 a year, with only a small amount of financial aid available. "I didn't want to come out of college with $200,000 in debt and have to spend 10 years paying it off," she said.

Yet she still sought a way to nurture her interest in technology. A year later, Ms. Gao holds the title of data strategist at Bitly, the URL-shortening service based in New York.

How did she catapult from dropping out of college to landing a plum job? She became an apprentice to Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bitly, through a new two-year program called Enstitute. It teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor's degree -- at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

"Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college," says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute's founders. "Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can't afford school."

In a few states, including Arkansas, Colorado, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, families can now compare colleges, and even majors, based on the actual first-year earnings of graduates of in-state schools. (Go to http://collegemeasures.org/esm/.) The salaries come from the states' unemployment-insurance programs, which collect earnings information from employers every quarter. Using Social Security numbers, the states then match the information to college graduates. (One limit of this method: The data don't include graduates who leave the state or are self-employed.)

Think a community-college degree is worth less than a credential from a four-year college? In Tennessee, the average first-year salaries of graduates with a two-year degree are $1,000 higher than those with a bachelor's degree. Technical degree holders from the state's community colleges often earn more their first year out than those who studied the same field at a four-year university.

Take graduates in health professions from Dyersburg State Community College. They not only finish two years earlier than their counterparts at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, but they also earn $5,300 more, on average, in their first year after graduation.

In Virginia, graduates with technical degrees from community colleges make $20,000 more in the first year after college than do graduates in several fields who get bachelor's degrees. Yet high-school seniors are regularly told that community colleges are for students who can't hack it on a four-year campus.

That's how Tom Carey landed at Radford University in Virginia as a business major, though his real love was working on cars. "There was definitely pressure" to go to a four-year school, he told me. "I had no interest in whatever degree I was getting at Radford."

After two years, Mr. Carey, who is from Reston, transferred to be closer to home and enrolled in the automotive-technology program at Northern Virginia Community College. He is now working at a Cadillac dealership and outearns business graduates from Radford's undergraduate program by several thousand dollars. That small difference grows considerably when you take into account that a community-college degree is a fraction of the cost of a bachelor's degree and that these students enter the workforce two years earlier.

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