Critical Thinker

1C Agenda 11-28-17: Lower Ed 151-200

 

PBS Subprime Education

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

The Backfire Effect

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:

1. Flexible hours
2. Accelerated education
3. High acceptance rate
4. Many online options
5. Get your Master's while working full-time
6. 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

The Backfire Effect

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"

 

 

 

 

1C Agenda 11-21-17: Lower Ed, John Oliver on For-Profit Colleges

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

The Backfire Effect

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.

See "Dollar Signs in Uniform."

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" 

 

 

 

1C Agenda 11-16-17: Lower Ed Lesson #1: Charlatans and Mountebanks 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

The Backfire Effect

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.

Recognizing Logical Fallacies

Begging the Question

Begging the question assumes that a statement is self-evident when it actually requires proof.

Major Premise: Fulfilling all my major desires is the only way I can be happy.

Minor Premise: I can’t afford when of my greatest desires in life, a Lexus GS350.

Conclusion: Therefore, I can never be happy.

Circular Reasoning

Circular reasoning occurs when we support a statement by restating it in different terms.

Stealing is wrong because it is illegal.

Admitting women into the men’s club is wrong because it’s an invalid policy.

Your essay is woeful because of its egregious construction.

Your boyfriend is hideous because of his heinous characteristics.

I have to sell my car because I’m ready to sell it.

I can’t spend time with my kids because it’s too time-consuming.

I need to spend more money on my presents than my family’s presents because I need bigger and better presents.

I’m a great father because I’m the best father my children have ever had.

Weak Analogy or Faulty Comparison

Analogies are never perfect but they can be powerful. The question is do they have a degree of validity to make them worth the effort.

A toxic relationship is like cancer that gets worse and worse (fine).

Sugar is high-octane fuel to use before your workout (weak because there is nothing high-octane about a substance that causes you to crash and converts into fat and creates other problems)

Free education is a great flame and the masses are moths flying into the flames of destruction. (horribly false analogy)

"Bailey, why do you cheat?"

 

Ad Hominem Fallacy (Personal Attack)

“Who are you to be a marriage counselor? You’ve been divorced six times?”

A lot of people give great advice and present sound arguments even if they don’t apply their principles to their lives, so we should focus on the argument, not a personal attack.

“So you believe in universal health care, do you? I suppose you’re a communist and you hate America as well.”

Making someone you disagree with an American-hating communist is invalid and doesn’t address the actual argument.

“What do you mean you don’t believe in marriage? What are you, a crazed nihilist, an unrepentant anarchist, an immoral misanthrope, a craven miscreant?”

Straw Man Fallacy

You twist and misconstrue your opponent’s argument to make it look weaker than it is when you refute it. Instead of attacking the real issue, you aim for a weaker issue based on your deliberate misinterpretation of your opponent’s argument.

“Those who are against universal health care are heartless. They obviously don’t care if innocent children die.”

Hasty Generalization (Jumping to a Conclusion)

“I’ve had three English instructors who are middle-aged bald men. Therefore, all English instructors are middle-aged bald men.”

“I’ve met three Americans with false British accents and they were all annoying. Therefore, all Americans, such as Madonna, who contrive British accents are annoying.” Perhaps some Americans do so ironically and as a result are more funny than annoying.

Either/Or Fallacy

There are only two choices to an issue is an over simplification and an either/or fallacy.

“Either you be my girlfriend or you don’t like real men.”

“Either you be my boyfriend or you’re not a real American.”

“Either you play football for me or you’re not a real man.”

“Either you’re for us or against us.” (The enemy of our enemy is our friend is everyday foreign policy.)

“Either you agree with me about increasing the minimum wage, or you’re okay with letting children starve to death.”

“Either you get a 4.0 and get admitted into USC, or you’re only half a man.”

Equivocation

Equivocation occurs when you deliberately twist the meaning of something in order to justify your position.

“You told me the used car you just sold me was in ‘good working condition.’”

“I said ‘good,’ not perfect.”

The seller is equivocating.

“I told you to be in bed by ten.”

“I thought you meant to be home by ten.”

“You told me you were going to pay me the money you owe me on Friday.”

“I didn’t know you meant the whole sum.”

“You told me you were going to take me out on my birthday.”

“Technically speaking, the picnic I made for us in the backyard was a form of ‘going out.’”

Red Herring Fallacy

This fallacy is to throw a distraction in your opponent’s face because you know a distraction may help you win the argument.

“Barack Obama wants us to support him but his father was a Muslim. How can we trust the President on the war against terrorism when he has terrorist ties?”

“You said you were going to pay me my thousand dollars today. Where is it?”

“Dear friend, I’ve been diagnosed with a very serious medical condition. Can we talk about our money issue some other time?”

Slippery Slope Fallacy

We go down a rabbit hole of exaggerated consequences to make our point sound convincing.

“If we allow gay marriage, we’ll have to allow people to marry gorillas.”

“If we allow gay marriage, my marriage to my wife will be disrespected and dishonored.”

Appeal to Authority

Using a celebrity to promote an energy drink doesn’t make this drink effective in increasing performance.

Listening to an actor play a doctor on TV doesn’t make the pharmaceutical he’s promoting safe or effective.

Tradition Fallacy

“We’ve never allowed women into our country club. Why should we start now?”

“Women have always served men. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it always should be.”

Misuse of Statistics

Using stats to show causality when it’s a condition of correlation or omitting other facts.

“Ninety-nine percent of people who take this remedy see their cold go away in ten days.” (Colds go away on their own).

“Violent crime from home intruders goes down twenty percent in a home equipped with guns.” (more people in those homes die of accidental shootings or suicides)

Post Hoc, Confusing Causality with Correlation

Taking cold medicine makes your cold go away. Really?

The rooster crows and makes the sun go up. Really?

You drink on a Thursday night and on Friday morning you get an A on your calculus exam. Really?

You stop drinking milk and you feel stronger. Really? (or is it a placebo effect?)

Non Sequitur (It Does Not Follow)

The conclusion in an argument is not relevant to the premises.

Megan drives a BMW, so she must be rich.

McMahon understands the difference between a phrase and a dependent clause; therefore, he must be a genius.

Whenever I eat chocolate cake, I feel good. Therefore, chocolate cake must be good for me.

Bandwagon Fallacy

Because everyone believes something, it must be right.

“You can steal a little at work. Everyone else does.”

“In Paris, ninety-nine percent of all husbands have a secret mistress. Therefore adultery is not immoral.”

 

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"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lesson #4 for Lower Ed: For-Profit Law Schools and For-Profit Colleges Vs. Community Colleges and Coded Language

"Even For-Profit Colleges Are Better Than Terrible Community Colleges"

"For-Profit on the Job Application"

"70% of California Community College Students Fail"

1 in 7 Transfer Rate

Average graduation rate for community colleges is 57%; El Camino's is 30%. 

For-Profit Colleges and the New Economy (Cottom)

Coded Language at For-Profit Colleges (Cottom)

 

"The American Bar Association Is Cracking Down on Bad Law Schools"

One. How do community colleges fare compared to FP colleges for getting students into the job market?

Not much better, we read on page 166.

These troubling facts of low community college success hamper the argument somewhat against FP colleges though the debt incurred from FP colleges makes them the worst choice of the two. 

Lower Ed Lesson #3: The “Hustle”

Sources

"Programs That Are Predatory: It's Not Just a For-Profit Colleges"

"For-Profit Colleges Accused of Fraud Still Receive U.S. Funds"

"Court Win for Students Over Predatory For-Profit Colleges"

"Screw U: How For-Profit Colleges Rip You Off"

"For-Profit College Students Face Higher Debt, Higher Unemployment, Report Finds"

 

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.

 

 

 

Lower Ed Lesson #2: Abysmal Job-Placement Rates

 

Resource: PBS Documentary: A Subprime Education  

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 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.

Political Disagreement over FP Colleges:

"The Closing of the Republican Mind on For-Profit Colleges"

 

Lower Ed Lesson #1: Charlatans and Mountebanks of For-Profit Colleges

 

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"