Many people who graduate from such programs struggle to find work. Those who do find work often make little money — too little to repay their debts from the program. Despite the happy poster images, the market for medical-assistant education is actually an allegory for the problems in the parts of higher education that tend to attract low-income and middle-class students: little regulation and uneven — often mediocre — results. The same problems afflict many community colleges, lower-tier four-year colleges and training programs in fields like office management and culinary arts.

According to the Department of Labor, the median annual salary for medical assistants in 2011 was $29,100. Yet most recent graduates of medical-assistant training programs earn much less, which suggests the programs are not reliable routes to good jobs as assistants. Among the 100,000 students who earned a medical-assistant certificate in 2008 or 2009, roughly 94 percent attended a program where graduates typically earned less than $20,000 in 2011, the data show. More than 50 percent attended a program where typical graduates earned less than someone working full time at the federal minimum wage would — $15,080. That can only mean many were not working full-time in any job.

A small number of public community colleges have successful medical-assistant programs, minting graduates who make $25,000 per year or more. But the industry is dominated by for-profit colleges, which produce more than nine out of 10 medical assistant certificates nationwide. For-profit programs are typically expensive and financed primarily with federally backed grants and student loans.

At the Texas School of Business in Houston, for example, the roughly 1,400 program graduates in 2008 and 2009 earned an average of $13,319 per year in 2011. There is no way to get paid that little as a full-time medical assistant. A spokesman for the national for-profit higher education corporation Kaplan, Inc., which owns the school, noted that the program’s earnings results were only somewhat worse than the $14,651 average for all Texas medical-assistant programs, and that unemployment rates were unusually high in those years.

The website of Drake College of Business in Elizabeth, N.J., promises, in large flashing letters, that students can complete a medical-assistant program “in less than 8 months.” But only 38 percent of graduates finish the program on time, and the average annual pay of recent graduates was only $12,031. Drake College declined to offer an explanation.