Essay #5, Your Capstone Essay, from Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that for-profit schools are so larded with deception, lies, and liabilities for the prospective student that these quasi-educational institutions must either be severely regulated or abolished altogether.
John Oliver’s FP College Critique—Video
One. What is a for-profit college?
Typically, FP colleges, which enroll 30% of all college students, are trade schools: beauty, cosmetics, mechanics, technology, business, criminal justice, electrical engineering, to name several.
FP colleges have a bad reputation for using deceptive recruitment practices, for overcharging students, and for having poor student outcomes in learning and career placement.
FP colleges persuade their students to go into debt with predatory loans rather than less expensive federal student loans.
Studies show in fact that most students are so burdened by debt and bleak job prospects after graduating FP colleges that they would have been better off never attending the FP college in the first place.
FP colleges are so egregiously bad that one of Cottom’s co-workers, Michael, had the opportunity to send his two kids to the FP college he worked at with a discount, and he passed because he said he had “better options.”
What does that say when a veteran at a FP college offered a discount still won’t send his kids there? That says he knows the dirt and he won’t subject his children to the fool’s errand of going to an FP college.
Two. What kind of trickery was used by Cottom’s school when giving students an entrance test called the Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test?
For starters, if you earned a 5 score, your IQ was at the level of a typical fifth grader. You needed a 6 to pass and you could take the test as many times as necessary to get that 6.
Everyone passes the test, but recruiters are trained to never tell people this. They need to make you feel “qualified” for being admitted into the school. That’s part of the sales pitch.
This is an old trick: Massage the prospective customer’s ego to make him feel he’s a good fit for your product.
Three. What other morally questionable techniques does Cottom expose in her discussion of recruiting Jason in the book’s Introduction?
She was under orders to get Jason’s aunt’s name and Social Security number and tell him he was a loser, not just to himself but to his entire family name, if he didn’t enroll the school.
Cottom is under orders to “close the deal” regardless if whether or not the school is in the student’s best interests. She is to work for her boss’s best interests and the company’s stock holders’ best interests.
Four. Why does Cottom compare educators with priests?
Because they “shepherd people’s collective faith in themselves and their trust in social institutions.” They foster faith in the school’s mission to champion the students’ best interests.
The “sin” of being a FP college recruiter is that you’re violating that faith and that trust. You’ve dragged the term “education” into the mud with deception and profit-mongering. Therefore, the FP college priests aren’t priests at all: They’re charlatans and mountebanks.
These charlatans persuaded students to sign up for predatory short-term loans that are far more expensive than federal student loans.
FP colleges piggy-back on the holy reputations of NP or “real” colleges.
But whereas FP colleges emphasize “individual good,” real colleges emphasize the “collective good” of living in a society where more and more people are educated with critical thinking skills and are part of an educated, civil society.
Educators are priests because of what is known as 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.”
FP colleges love the words, “no matter the cost.”
Today, Cottom, teaching at a real university is a real priest, and she has the perspective to cast light on the evil practices of FP colleges.
Five. Why are FP colleges philosophically unsound?
Let’s look at the following syllogism:
Premise 1: College should be about serving the needs of the student first and foremost. Of course, a college should be solvent and accredited but these goals are also in service to the student.
Premise 2: FP colleges, indicated by their very name, put profit over the students’ needs.
Conclusion: Therefore, FP colleges should not exist.
We can develop this idea by looking at other industries that become compromised when we make a conflict between public and private interests?
Should prisons be for-profit? Should we make policies designed to help the prison industry or society?
Should health care be for-profit? Should we make policies designed to help the FP health companies or public health?
Six. What is “Lower Ed”?
Cottom writes: “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 is the subsector of high-risk post-secondary schools and colleges that are part of the same system as the most elite institutions.”
Lower Ed feeds of Higher Ed:
“In fact, Lower Ed can exist precisely because elite Higher Ed does. The latter legitimizes the education gospel while the former absorbs all manner of vulnerable groups who believe in it: single mothers, downsized workers, veterans, people of color, and people transitioning from welfare to work. Lower Ed is, first and foremost, a set of institutions organized to commodify social inequalities and make no social contributions . . . “
Seven. What is most damning about Lower Ed?
Of all the people Cottom meets at FP colleges, workers, students, graduates, and family members of students, NONE of them recommend FP college.
We can conclude that FP colleges don’t give to students and society. FP colleges are parasites that take more than they give.
Parasite Loans
The parasite works most effectively with student loans. We read “that decades of deregulation culture opened the federal student aid tap to predatory for-profit shills who would enroll anyone with a pulse to get their hands on sweet, sweet, publicly subsidized, government-guaranteed cash.”
This parasite is more dangerous in the New Economy:
4 Characteristics of New Economy
One. People are frequently changing jobs and therefore need to be re-trained and get additional work certificates and diplomas.
Two. Firms place greater reliance on temporary labor.
Three. There is less reliance on employers for income growth and career progression.
Four. Workers are responsible for shouldering more responsibility for their job training, healthcare, and retirement.
FP colleges thrive on the New Economy.
Eight. How is Cottom’s book about social justice?
She writes: “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.”
She continues: “By their own description across various official documents, for-profit colleges rely on prospective students whose aspirations outstrip their available options for mobility.”
We have a predator seeking weak prey.
Predator Component
"When For-Profit Colleges Prey on Unsuspecting Students"
"Empty Promises of For-Profit Colleges"
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