Lower Ed, Tressie McMillan Cottom
Lower Ed, Tressie McMillan Cottom
List: $16.99 | Sale: $11.89
Club: $8.49

Lower Ed
The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy

Author: Tressie McMillan Cottom

Narrator: Lisa Reneé Pitts

Unabridged: 8 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/31/2017


Synopsis

More than two million students are enrolled in for-profit colleges, from the small family-run operations to the behemoths brandished on billboards, subway ads, and late-night commercials. These schools have been around just as long as their bucolic not-for-profit counterparts, yet shockingly little is known about why they have expanded so rapidly in recent years—during the so-called Wall Street era of for-profit colleges.

In Lower Ed Tressie McMillan Cottom—a bold and rising public scholar, herself once a recruiter at two for-profit colleges—expertly parses the fraught dynamics of this big-money industry to show precisely how it is part and parcel of the growing inequality plaguing the country today. McMillan Cottom discloses the shrewd recruitment and marketing strategies that these schools deploy and explains how, despite the well-documented predatory practices of some and the campus closings of others, ending for-profit colleges won't end the vulnerabilities that made them the fastest growing sector of higher education at the turn of the twenty-first century. And she doesn’t stop there.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane on November 30, 2016

In Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, Tressie McMillan Cottom is at her very best--rigorous, incisive, empathetic, and witty. Lower Ed is a definitive accounting of the for-profit college phenomenon, who benefits from such schools and who is preyed upon. McMillan......more

Goodreads review by Thomas on November 21, 2017

A fascinating and sobering examination of the for-profit college phenomenon in the United States. As someone who has a good amount of economic privilege, I always tuned out commercials and advertisements for for-profit colleges. I did not think in any deep way about what their presence meant about o......more

Goodreads review by Bogi on March 05, 2017

This was amazing, I just took a peek and could not stop reading, I was basically nailed to the book. It's based on the author's own ethnographic and sociological research; also ownvoices in multiple aspects. I can already see it on my 2017 best nonfiction reads list (eek I still need to post the 201......more

Goodreads review by Rt on March 13, 2017

Cottom’s excellent new book is about for-profit colleges and credentialing, but it’s really about the collapse of the safety net and the dumping of risk on individuals. It’s also about really effective marketing techniques. For-profit colleges became more attractive as the labor market became more un......more