One group you spent time with, whose members invoked aspects of the education gospel, were the women in the Facebook group called Sisters Working to Achieve Greatness, or SWAG. Yet they really fall down in the high cost, the high risk of not completing and the poor job outcomes. It's really clear, in SEC filings, for example, how deliberate they are in using "College" and "University" in their names, or getting a "dot-edu" Internet address. We trust education will have a positive effect on our lives and our society. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson say the education gospel is about the faith we have in education and what a significant role that faith plays in what we call our opportunity structure, or how we distribute rewards in society. You use the term "education gospel." What is that, and how does it affect our understanding of the job for-profit colleges are doing? But if workers don't have some way to extract better money from employers, more stability and security, that's why we have government and unions. Now we're at the end of that rope - debt has made it run out. "College for all" was the response to changes in the job market that made people unstable and insecure.
You write that we should place more blame for the growth of "Lower Ed" on changing labor markets and those fraying social safety nets.įor 15 or 20 years we've had this narrative that everybody needs to go to college.
As long as the social safety net continues to fray, job cycles are short and incomes are spiky, there will be demand. For-profit stocks have been bullish because that political change means less regulatory cost. But the cost of managing regulation had gotten high as well. We attribute too much of that enrollment bust to people wising up. But now we have a president who himself started the for-profit, nonaccredited Trump University, and reports are that the stocks of for-profit college companies are rising. The last few years brought a string of much-publicized closures and crackdowns on companies like Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute.
Here's an edited version of our conversation. We called up Cottom to hear her thoughts. NPR Ed has covered both the rise, and some of the travails, of this form of education. They're not named, but known only as "Beauty College" and "Technical College" in her new book, Lower Ed. But she has also helped enroll students at two different for-profits herself. She has analyzed large data sets, scrutinized financial filings, interviewed students and staff. Tressie McMillan Cottom studies for-profit colleges as a sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University.
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