Purdue Owl MLA Electronic Sources
A YouTube Video
Video and audio sources need to be documented using the same basic guidelines for citing print sources in MLA style. Include as much descriptive information as necessary to help readers understand the type and nature of the source you are citing. If the author’s name is the same as the uploader, only cite the author once. If the author is different from the uploaded, cite the author’s name before the title.
“8 Hot Dog Gadgets put to the Test.” YouTube, uploaded by Crazy Russian Hacker, 6 June 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBlpjSEtELs.
McGonigal, Jane. “Gaming and Productivity.” YouTube, uploaded by Big Think, 3 July 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkdzy9bWW3E.
4 essay assignments to turn in between now and the end of the semester:
Writing Assignment #1: November 30: Blue Book Exam #1 for Lower Ed
Writing Assignment #2: December 7: Peer Edit for Final Essay #5
Writing Assignment #3: December 12: Final Essay #5 Due
Writing Assignment #4: December 12 and 14: Blue Book Exam #2 based on "Unfollow" by Adrian Chen and "The Backfire Effect" from The Oatmeal.
Materials for Blue Book Exam: How Megan Phelps-Roper used critical thinking to leave a religious cult
"Unfollow" by Adrian Chen
Also, see "You're Not So Smart"
Blue Book Prompt: Reading Adrian Chen's "Unfollow," watching Megan Phelps-Roper's Ted Talk (optional), and reading "The Backfire Effect," write a 5-paragraph essay that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper used critical thinking skills to overcome The Backfire Effect.
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.
To get credit, you must have a counterargument section and a Works Cited page with no fewer than 3 sources.
Counterarguments to Consider:
- Flexible hours
- Accelerated education
- High acceptance rate
- Many online options
- Get your Master's while working full-time
- Community colleges only do slightly better at helping students get jobs. See page 166.
See "Dollar Signs in Uniform."
Blue Book In-Class Exam for 11-30-17
Has Cottom made a fair claim in her book Lower Ed that FP colleges engage in predatory practices against people at the bottom of the economic ladder? Support your answer in a 5-paragraph essay.
Study Questions
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.
Study Questions for Lesson 2:
One. What is the value of a diploma from a FP college?
Employers are as likely to call a FPC applicant as much as a high school graduate, we read on page 28.
You could also have a fake college degree and get equal calls as someone with a FPC degree.
Employers have a preference for degrees from traditional institutions, not FP colleges.
Some employers have their “human resources professionals develop informal screening processes to weed out ‘diploma mills.’” So we can conclude a FP college degree carries a stigma.
The majority of students enrolled in FP colleges do not graduate, so we don’t have data on them of course regarding their job placement.
Two. What is the inherent conflict of interest of a FP college?
Students are placed in the backseat to profits even though FP colleges use the sanctimonious language of traditional colleges. As we read: “For-profit colleges ‘use the language of colleges and universities but operate like corporations or sole-proprietorships.’”
For-profit colleges can extract excess revenue and distribute it as profit, whereas not-for-profit colleges cannot.
Three. What is the growth of FP colleges and what is their demographic target?
Two million students were enrolled at FP colleges in 2010, up from less than 400,000 in 2000.
1 in 20 of all students attend FP colleges.
1 in 10 black students do.
1 in 14 Latino students do.
Typical FP college student is a woman and a parent.
Most FP college graduates are African-American.
The majority of FP college students will not have graduated in 6 years.
Since 2012, growth in FP colleges is on the decline.
A 2015 LA Times article shows that many FP colleges are “tanking,” with decline rates between 22 and 34%.
The growth of FB colleges is dependent on a “financialized” culture in which people don’t change money for goods; rather, they use credit and debt “to construct their lives and accouterments.”
Because FP colleges depend on consumers who must rely on debt, they are in a position to prey on the most financially challenged.
FP colleges also prey on people who are in a state of economic insecurity.
FP beauty colleges offering short-term certificates of a greater share of “brown people, more women, and more poor people.”
Four. Why are financially insecure consumers drawn to FP colleges?
Cottom writes: “The more insecure people feel, the more they are willing to spend money for an insurance policy against low wages, unemployment, and downward mobility. Those least likely to have an insurance policy that our labor market values are people for whom higher education has always been a long shot: poor people, single parents, the socially isolated, African Americans, the working class. When education researchers talk about the unmet consumer demand that for-profit colleges serve, they’re talking about inequality. “
Poor, vulnerable people are the prime target of a high-cost, high-risk, debt-driven system.
Five. What kind of telemarketing tactics did Cottom use as a recruiter? Are such tactics used by traditional colleges?
Using Accu-track, she had a script in which she had to lie, saying that you were returning a call because they had called the school. If they hadn’t, you asked if they thought about the school. You were required to get a name, any name, in order to make follow-up calls.
This was a high-pressure tactic for a 9-month program that costs over 15k.
Six. What kind of financial demands were put on the students?
We read that the students could not afford the $1,200 cash deposit or the $500-$700 monthly payments to stay enrolled.
Additionally, the students had to purchase their own equipment in excess of $350.
Working at both a beauty and technical college, not once has Cottom heard “for-profit college,” so she inferred it was a “dirty term.” The objective, she infers, is to confuse Americans so they do not the know the distinction between a nonprofit, traditional college and a for-profit college.
Seven. Are academics the ones who run for-profit colleges?
No. They’re “business guys.” They know nothing of education. They do know, however, how to engage people in high-pressure sales and close high-profit loans and graduate a small fraction with largely useless degrees.
One. Why is FP college such a bad idea?
It creates high debt.
It creates poor job prospects.
It creates low esteem from others in society.
It creates low meaning types of jobs.
Two. What is a student loan refund check?
A student borrows more than the cost of tuition.
A student borrow for estimated COA, cost of attendance.
An overpayment results in a refund to be used toward COA costs.
These refunds are sometimes used for food and housing.
Poor students use COA money to help them eat and prevent homelessness.
A COA is also used for business ventures by more entrepreneurial students.
Cottom meets Mike who like many graduates working in the new economy find themselves forced to constantly upgrade their résumé so they can survive in their “hollowed out middle class jobs,” which no longer offer security or medical benefits.
Three. What is the hustle?
The hustle consists of three things.
One first has to play by the rules, which means going to college and minimizing risky behaviors that might impede college success.
Two, one has to get a decent job.
Three, one has to engage in “entrepreneurialism,” which means to start one’s own business.
Having your own business and a lavish income is part of the dominant culture’s expectations for men: materialistic success.
Mike has graduated from Morehouse, a very prestigious college that prides itself on having Martin Luther King and Spike Lee as graduates, to name just a couple.
But for Mike, a BA from Morehouse is not enough. He needs an MBA to become an entrepreneur. And he’s willing to go to a phony school, as he sees it, to get his MBA.
A NP college is “not real,” for Mike and many others, but it is a means to get easy loans and easy admittance.
Four. Why is the FP college not a real college in terms of perception by most?
Fake colleges offer the following:
Easy admittance
Easy loans
Easy curriculum
Standardized curriculum
42% of students get vocational degrees.
18% of students get associate degrees.
Only 5% get bachelors degrees.
10% get master degrees.
2.4 million students enroll in FP colleges.
Different professors use the same course work for over a decade.
You might get the same Wikipedia print-outs for over a decade.
You get “low-risk recycled work,” which is often finished by previous students who give you their completed course work. All of these short cuts are very appealing to Mike.
Five. What are some important demographics for FP colleges?
69% of white graduates are in college debt.
94% of black graduates are in college debt.
Debt is relative:
Average debt for college graduate is $29,400 based on stats Cottom gives us.
In 2017, it’s up to over 37K.
Average debt for FP college is close to 35K in 2008.
My dental hygienist went to FP college and it cost her 100K in loans and 10 years of payments. She says she wouldn't do it again.
Students may borrow $20,500 a year at FP colleges (133).
Cumulative loan limits at FP colleges are $138,500.
See above essay for hight debt and unemployment.
When Debt Is Worth It
Average debt for Harvard law student in 2015 is close to 150K but the job prospects and social status make that debt easily worth it.
Political Disagreement over FP Colleges:
"The Closing of the Republican Mind on For-Profit Colleges"
Predator Component
"When For-Profit Colleges Prey on Unsuspecting Students"
"Empty Promises of For-Profit Colleges"
Important Dates:
November 30: Blue Book Exam #1 for Lower Ed
December 7: Peer Edit for Final Essay #5
December 12: Final Essay #5 Due
December 12 and 14: Blue Book Exam #2 based on "Unfollow" by Adrian Chen and "The Backfire Effect" from The Oatmeal.
Materials for Blue Book Exam: How Megan Phelps-Roper used critical thinking to leave a religious cult
"Unfollow" by Adrian Chen
Also, see "You're Not So Smart"
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.
To get credit, you must have a counterargument section and a Works Cited page with no fewer than 3 sources.
Resource: PBS Documentary: A Subprime Education
Study Questions:
One. What is the value of a diploma from a FP college?
Employers are as likely to call a FPC applicant as much as a high school graduate, we read on page 28.
You could also have a fake college degree and get equal calls as someone with a FPC degree.
Employers have a preference for degrees from traditional institutions, not FP colleges.
Some employers have their “human resources professionals develop informal screening processes to weed out ‘diploma mills.’” So we can conclude a FP college degree carries a stigma.
The majority of students enrolled in FP colleges do not graduate, so we don’t have data on them of course regarding their job placement.
Two. What is the inherent conflict of interest of a FP college?
Students are placed in the backseat to profits even though FP colleges use the sanctimonious language of traditional colleges. As we read: “For-profit colleges ‘use the language of colleges and universities but operate like corporations or sole-proprietorships.’”
For-profit colleges can extract excess revenue and distribute it as profit, whereas not-for-profit colleges cannot.
Three. What is the growth of FP colleges and what is their demographic target?
Two million students were enrolled at FP colleges in 2010, up from less than 400,000 in 2000.
1 in 20 of all students attend FP colleges.
1 in 10 black students do.
1 in 14 Latino students do.
Typical FP college student is a woman and a parent.
Most FP college graduates are African-American.
The majority of FP college students will not have graduated in 6 years.
Since 2012, growth in FP colleges is on the decline.
A 2015 LA Times article shows that many FP colleges are “tanking,” with decline rates between 22 and 34%.
The growth of FB colleges is dependent on a “financialized” culture in which people don’t change money for goods; rather, they use credit and debt “to construct their lives and accouterments.”
Because FP colleges depend on consumers who must rely on debt, they are in a position to prey on the most financially challenged.
FP colleges also prey on people who are in a state of economic insecurity.
FP beauty colleges offering short-term certificates of a greater share of “brown people, more women, and more poor people.”
Four. Why are financially insecure consumers drawn to FP colleges?
Cottom writes: “The more insecure people feel, the more they are willing to spend money for an insurance policy against low wages, unemployment, and downward mobility. Those least likely to have an insurance policy that our labor market values are people for whom higher education has always been a long shot: poor people, single parents, the socially isolated, African Americans, the working class. When education researchers talk about the unmet consumer demand that for-profit colleges serve, they’re talking about inequality. “
Poor, vulnerable people are the prime target of a high-cost, high-risk, debt-driven system.
Five. What kind of telemarketing tactics did Cottom use as a recruiter? Are such tactics used by traditional colleges?
Using Accu-track, she had a script in which she had to lie, saying that you were returning a call because they had called the school. If they hadn’t, you asked if they thought about the school. You were required to get a name, any name, in order to make follow-up calls.
This was a high-pressure tactic for a 9-month program that costs over 15k.
Six. What kind of financial demands were put on the students?
We read that the students could not afford the $1,200 cash deposit or the $500-$700 monthly payments to stay enrolled.
Additionally, the students had to purchase their own equipment in excess of $350.
Working at both a beauty and technical college, not once has Cottom heard “for-profit college,” so she inferred it was a “dirty term.” The objective, she infers, is to confuse Americans so they do not the know the distinction between a nonprofit, traditional college and a for-profit college.
Seven. Are academics the ones who run for-profit colleges?
No. They’re “business guys.” They no nothing of education. They do know, however, how to engage people in high-pressure sales and close high-profit loans and graduate a small fraction with largely useless degrees.
"Empty Promises of For-Profit Colleges"
"Who's Regulating For-Profit Schools?"
Political Disagreement over FP Colleges:
"The Closing of the Republican Mind on For-Profit Colleges"
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