Prof. Cottom is one of the nation's foremost sociologists of higher education, and her first solo authored book is an incredible combination of scholarship and storytelling. Before her doctoral work, Cottom worked as an "enrollment counselor" in two for-profit higher education institutions with different sectors and clientele. With a keen eye for details and human relationships (and an extensive LiveJournal blog to help job her memory), Cottom describes her front line work enrolling students in Beauty College and Technical College, and the mythology of educational salvation that had her and her colleagues convinced that encouraging low-income, minority students to take on massive debts with their families to pursue degrees with questionable labor market value was an unquestionable social good. This front row seat to the student enrollment experience is complimented by later fieldwork from her doctoral work with a diverse set of sources: SEC filings from university holding companies, interviews with woman seeking doctoral degrees from for-profit universities, and her own exercises in enrolling in these universities. Both her stories and her more technical analyses are compelling, and her ease at moving back and forth between the two is one of the remarkable characteristics of her writing.
Cottom's thesis is that the driving forces behind the rise of for-profit, financialized Lower Ed are persistent social inequality combined with a shift in risk from institutions to individuals, most prominently here a shift in responsibilities for job training from employers and government to individual students and employees. This shift is partially masked by a collective myth-making about higher education as a source of the collective good, allowing for-profit conglomerates to ride the moral coattails of elite universities: elite Ed's explanations about why they don't need to distribute their enormous endowments or get taxed justify Lower Ed's expansion and growth to serve non-traditional students. But the conditions for Lower Ed to rise required a bipartisan faith in markets as the rational mechanism for distributing educational credentials, rather than a collective responsibility to use policy to support full employment and public funding of higher education. As carefully as Cottom describes the stories of individual actors, the real intellectual accomplishment is interpreting their actions as parts of larger systems.
Cottom refuses to blame the poor judgment of students or the evil hearts of college enrollment managers, but insists that we see the society that we all build and share as responsible for the social inequalities that produce Lower Ed.
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Heartbreaking
Lower Ed is a Powerhouse of a book. Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom does an excellent job looking at the privatized education system in America.It reminds me of my own time working as a student trying to get a certificate. I ran into people who had both been students and as professors and there's a certain type of student I really feel as if they're the ones being preyed upon by the system.She covers it as well but there is a subset of ambitious African American women from backgrounds that aren't tied into the traditional education system that see these kinds of schools as the way up and out. It's a little distressing both of my own experience and in the reading to see those ambitions as realized only to see them as coming to fruition with degrees that don't have a lot of worth in the wider society either on the job market or the academic market. I can’t imagine spending the time and money investing in a degree that was worthless. Oh, wait, too late. It's a formal accusation about the schools and about the opportunities that you get on the other side of Education. It's a terrific book but it's heartbreaking.
