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

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Economist W. Norton Grubb and historian Marvin Lazerson call this the education gospel: our faith in education as moral, personally edifying, collectively beneficial, and a worthwhile investment no matter the cost, either individual or societal.

Based on the education gospel, we increasingly demand more personal sacrifice from those who would pursue higher education: more loans, fewer grants; more choices, fewer practical options; more possibilities, more risk of failing to attain any of them.

Lower Ed refers to credential expansion created by structural changes in how we work, unequal group access to favorable higher education schemes, and the risk shift of job training, from states and companies to individuals and families, exclusively for profit.

Lower Ed encompasses all credential expansion that leverages our faith in education without challenging its market imperatives and that preserves the status quo of race, class, and gender inequalities in education and work. When we offer more credentials in lieu of a stronger social contract, it is Lower Ed. When we ask for social insurance and get workforce training, it is Lower Ed. When we ask for justice and get “opportunity,” it is Lower Ed.

I make an explicit claim in this book: for-profit colleges are distinct from traditional not-for-profit colleges in that their long-term viability depends upon acute, sustained socioeconomic inequalities.

More credentials in perpetuity for a population with aspirations but limited means of mobility is a bad social prescription for a healthy body politic, but it is a very profitable prescription for Lower Ed.

Sociologists have developed the idea of credentialing theory or credentialism to understand the complex interplay between macro social and economic changes, how groups experience those changes, and how systems produce new credentials en masse to navigate those changes.

assigning blame can get in the way of understanding complex social phenomena.

No matter how far the social distance between poor blacks and wealthy blacks, social problems like police violence truncate the road between us. For-profit colleges are similar.

Time has become the commodity being traded for institutional prestige.

Until the Wall Street era of for-profit colleges, price was a fairly good proxy for institutional prestige. A good college was generally a more expensive one. A less expensive college was generally less prestigious. Only with the rapid rise of for-profit colleges and their expansion into upmarket degrees did price become decoupled from prestige.