{"id":64171,"date":"2014-09-17T09:00:31","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T14:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=64171"},"modified":"2014-09-17T00:46:42","modified_gmt":"2014-09-17T05:46:42","slug":"64171","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/09\/17\/64171\/","title":{"rendered":"For-Profit Colleges and the Conditions that Feed Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the better things about social media is that if you manage to curate social feeds with just the right balance of entertaining spirits and brilliant intellects, it delivers unto you amazing content you would have otherwise missed.<\/p>\n

I woke up one of these days \u2014 Sunday? Monday? I\u2019m dissertating \u2014 to find dozens of messages from social media comrades about John Oliver\u2019s take-down of for-profit colleges. You can watch it here:<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

It\u2019s very satisfying.<\/p>\n

It is particularly satisfying if you\u2019ve experienced what education professor Kevin Kinser<\/a> rightly points out is the oddly sporadic\u00a0nature of public interest in a 100 year old institutional practice of selling education for profit. Oliver is one of the best in the entertainment-as-news genre. He reaches people that mainstream media does not. He makes difficult issues palatable for general, concerned audiences.<\/p>\n

And if you think about debt, precarity, credentialism, and financial cronyism, like I do, it is gratifying to see someone like Oliver take on an issue most people could care less about until someone they care about borrows $50,000 for a veterinary assistant\u2019s degree. Then they\u2019re emailing you like the roof is on fire.<\/p>\n

I do have a greater hope, though, than that something I study benefit from the spotlight of people like Oliver.<\/p>\n

I wish we could talk about impoverished educations without ignoring impoverished conditions.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing, for-profit colleges have manipulated\u00a0a system primed for manipulation. No doubt about that. But eliminating for-profit colleges does not eliminate the conditions that cause people to seek them out.<\/p>\n

By and large, none of the people I have interviewed, observed or worked with is an idiot without agency. They have sometimes been lied to and led astray; occasionally they are bamboozled by sparkly advertising and aggressive sales tactics. They do sign documents they do not completely understand and they trust authority that has little incentive to counsel as opposed to sell. All of that is true.<\/p>\n

But most students picked up the phone to \u201ccall today; start tomorrow\u201d because they have been unemployed, underemployed, marginalized, and otherwise made vulnerable by socio-economic conditions.<\/p>\n

So, by all means,\u00a0crib Oliver\u2019s letter.<\/a>\u00a0It\u2019s a doozy.<\/p>\n

But maybe keep in mind that moving inequality around isn\u2019t exactly the same as addressing inequality.<\/p>\n

\n

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a PhD candidate in the\u00a0Sociology Department<\/a>\u00a0at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. \u00a0Her doctoral research is a comparative study of the expansion of for-profit colleges. \u00a0You can follow her\u00a0<\/em>on\u00a0twitter<\/a>\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0at her\u00a0blog<\/a>, where this post originally appeared.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the better things about social media is that if you manage to curate social feeds with just the right balance of entertaining spirits and brilliant intellects, it delivers unto you amazing content you would have otherwise missed. I woke up one of these days \u2014 Sunday? Monday? I\u2019m dissertating \u2014 to find dozens […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":64176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[209,29,36,98,34,8118],"class_list":["post-64171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-class","tag-economics","tag-capitalism","tag-education","tag-organizationsinstitutions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/09\/35.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64171"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64175,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64171\/revisions\/64175"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}