Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

When students like Jason came to visit, anyone who couldn’t name a specific occupational interest or degree program was steered to technology or business.

Sterred- not counseled or given an guidance process.

If you didn’t know what you wanted a degree in or what kind of job you hoped to have, technology and business were deemed suitably general enough to tell you how much you’d like them but specific enough to sound like something you heard on the news was a “good job.” Jason didn’t know what he wanted a degree in, so I told him about technology and business.

“I always upgrade my phone.”

There is no thought process - gudiance- relfection - education - just a quick- look over- WTF!

area’s non-denominational megachurches that met in shopping centers and played rock music during worship.

Jason had graduated from high school but suffered from severe test anxiety, which had caught up with him when he once enrolled in community college.

Even the community college is not involved- caring- trying to figure out how to truly help someone like Jason. Makes me wonder if policies to stop funding colleges and universities are done to push people in to for profit schools. Some sinister, horrible conspiracy to pray on the poor or uninformed.

One day I turned to a colleague to try to make sense of how I felt. Wasn’t I helping Jason change his life for the better? Michael was the most senior enrollment officer in the office. He had worked his way up to only conducting tours of area high school career fairs.

The new economy’s work contract affects all workers, albeit differently due to job polarization. That’s the phenomenon of highly educated workers

effect, we blame people for doing precisely what the education gospel demands that they do.

them, I realized there is a more satisfying if damning explanation for the rise of for-profit colleges in the Wall Street era

Inequalities in how we work, exacerbated by social policies and legitimized by individualist notions of education as a consumer good, conspired to create the demand for a credential that would insure

workers against b...

a credential that makes it hard to move back into traditional higher education, which may be more prestigious, less expensive, or better suited for the student.

their boom-and-bust investment cycles, is a symptom of larger issues wrought by changes in how we work and our unwillingness to legislate in order to protect our social contract.

Kevin starts with the one word that wasn’t in his op-ed and is rarely uttered in the Horatio Alger public policy that eats up his kind of personal story with a gilded spoon. “Luck. My story was a lot of luck,” Kevin tells me.

This is true for me too. IHow did I end up at Georgetown University? LUCK! Hardwork but not purposeful work on my part. I did nto set out to get in to Georgetwon. I just alwasy studied and did my best with in the circumstances that I was in. I always loved to learn so I just did my best.

Although he grew up “mostly poor,” for a few years he lived in a wealthier neighborhood when his mother entered a new relationship.

Same for me, but the realtionship my mother was in was related to my mother;s sister. It was our family connection. My aunt is married to a doctor and when my parents divorced my mother, brother adn I mivedin with them.

The trick is that you have to apply to know it is an option—unless, of course, you have a cultural liaison to decode a process that is deliberately obtuse to outsiders like Kevin.

one friendship yielded unexpected fruit that would change the course of Kevin’s life.

These were the people you meet that Kevin cannot describe. And meeting them can change your life for the better and for the worse, often doing both at the same time.

“You mean,” he finally said, “you can drop out of high school and . . . come back?” He was confused because in almost no other system in the world is that as possible.

Research shows that empathy, the kind that a professor or a benefactor acts on when a student reminds her of her son or herself years ago, is racialized.

“This is who we are relative to who our institutional peers are.” And because the vast majority of the public will never attend an elite college, and only in recent history has a slight majority attended any college at all, collegiate leagues are an implicit signal of prestige.

Articulation agreements are first, genuinely, and most ostensibly about maintaining curriculum quality.

Why would a state public college not extend articulation agreements to for-profit colleges, especially if doing so would open up that porous structure I described earlier?

First, traditional colleges of all prestige levels have serious concerns about the quality of courses at for-profit colleges. Some of this is about elitism, but, again, we endeavor to be fair and critical in the disciplined meaning of the word.

An increase in political scrutiny has made for-profit colleges, and particularly their corporate superiors, sensitive to outside research attempts.

Another reason traditional colleges have been slow to develop articulation agreements with for-profit colleges is because we may not all be Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, but many of us want to be.

Colleges, like the “WannabeUs” or universities that Gaye Tuchman describes in her book, Wannabe U, are very sensitive to anything that might compromise the perceived value of their credentials as signals for important stakeholders—political bodies, accreditors, prospective students, and, yes, recruitment agents.

degree. Raley wondered if I had some advice. I have had this conversation maybe 250 times now with people on buses, with administrative assistants in the office of my university, audience members, and random readers and tweeters who do not know me at all. Sometimes they are asking for themselves, but overwhelmingly they are asking for a family member.

something about money.

Sometimes all you need is to be able to check the box that says “college” next to “highest education finished” to move along in a hiring process.

basis, I completed verification documents for women who were on public assistance. The forms verified the hours that they were in class. I also helped students when they needed additional documentation to get childcare subsidies, like discounted daycare rates. This support with paperwork was vital to enrolling students at the Beauty College and to keeping them enrolled. We relied on our students’ ability to come to class to earn their “clock hours,” the time they were physically present in class.

We know that the majority of Americans will be poor at some point in their lives.

To talk about poverty is to talk about ourselves at some point in our lives.

Long-term planning, be it financial planning or educational planning, is a luxury born of means. We also know that one’s relationship to money and debt is different when one has been poor, is poor, or fears becoming poor again.

I was never able to conduct my study of welfare programs at the for-profit college after the State Bureau of Investigators closed my field site. Some researchers have found quantitative links between changes in welfare policies and enrollment in short-term credential programs, the sort that for-profit colleges dominate.

context in which credentialing programs operate matters.

If you are concerned about vulnerable people making expensive educational decisions with little information, then you might disdain the “predatory” for-profit schools.

Consequently, we treat them differently than we treat for-profit colleges, even when they have similar dropout rates and poor job-placement stats.

we blame them both for labor market failures.

This kind of professionalization and educational inflation falls under the “declining internal labor markets” rubric of the new economy.

Seventy-eight percent of them had dependent children or relatives, like aging parents.

Data from sociologist David Brown shows that credentials

research by Nidia Bañuelos reveals how for-profit MBA programs did not directly meet a labor market need for business graduates as much as they enrolled women and minorities who wanted a good job.4

If we have a shitty credentialing system, in the case of for-profit colleges, then it is likely because we have a shitty labor market.

goes, the new economy values knowledge workers with cognitive skills, and degrees represent those kinds of skills.

That is, the workers those students become will have the resources—time, money, and know-how—to put the company first and take certain “calculated” risks, like relocating or lateral career moves.

students I have talked to, a credential mostly meant insurance against precisely the kind of cultural assumptions that the knowledge economy wants: a worker who embraces and embodies a new type of social contract.

information asymmetry, wherein prospective students are provided the information to make rational decisions about enrolling in a college, assumes that there is a rational educational choice that can be made.

Changes in how we work created demand for fast credentials.

negative social insurance program positions private-sector goods to profit from predictable systemic social inequalities, ostensibly for the public good.