Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Author:Tressie McMillan Cottom [Cottom, Tressie McMillan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781620971024
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

Let’s All Admit—There’s Time to Enroll

Aaron, the marketing executive from Chapter 3, gave me an idea of how nuanced student data collected by for-profit corporations shapes various parts of the for-profit college apparatus. Who is most likely to call a for-profit college is steeped in various structural inequalities, a fact that made me wonder in what other ways their organizational structure tapped into those inequalities. I knew from my time spent on the inside that few stages of the process are as vital to the for-profit college mission as enrolling new students. It is arguably the single most critical part of the process for these schools to get right. It is expensive, which is why for-profit colleges devote more of their operating budgets to advertising and recruitment than they do to instruction and counseling. To understand what kinds of students a credentialing organization is designed for, one can study for whom the organization’s most critical functions work best.

I had my experience in for-profit colleges, and by 2011 things had changed since my time working in them. The new economy that was really just beginning to take hold in the early 2000s was now considered by many to be the dominant mode of work for the typical U.S. worker. That also happened to be the period in which shareholder for-profit colleges found a very receptive investment and regulatory audience. And it was the period during which forprofit colleges had moved beyond the “typical” likely student to increasingly enroll more affluent students in higher-level degree programs. What these dissimilar groups have in common that the for-profit college process so efficiently zeroes in on—to the tune of billions of dollars in tuition revenue—is a lack of time. Whether there was barely any extra time in their days, little extra time in their work week, or no time to waste before earning a better wage to make ends meet, they all possessed a real and present sense of urgency.

In 2012 and 2013, I enrolled in nine for-profit colleges in a city where there is no shortage of higher education options. According to one city document, Atlanta, Georgia, has one of the densest clusters of higher education institutions in the country. It also has one of the most robust systems of public, community, and historically black colleges. These colleges are arguably known for enrolling the kinds of students that are increasingly enrolling in for-profit colleges. If you go to a for-profit college in Atlanta, Georgia, it is not for want of traditional college options. I called or contacted each of the nine institutions (a mix chosen to represent the sector’s diversity) as any prospective student would. And then I leaned out of the process, letting the enrollment counselors and organizational steps guide me rather than actively trying to shape the processes to suit my needs and tastes. The point was to behave as similar to the likely prospective student as possible. I could not change who or what I was—namely, a middle-class, African American doctoral student.

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