Oh, yeah

21 Jan

I realized that I didn’t link to my own article on my own blog. LOL

So, here’s the HuffPo piece on for-profit colleges, race, class, and educational justice.

The challenge, for me, was to speak plainly about the many structural inequalities that produce a ready-made population that for-profit colleges serve or prey upon, depending upon one’s perspective. The fact is the for-profit sector is responding to a manufactured need; a need manufactured by a grossly unequal K-12 system, a hierarchial traditional college sector, and fundemental structural changes in the U.S. economy.

The truth is: there is not enough middle class work for all who aspire to middle class labor; the K-12 system produces millions of aspirational young adults who are tragically under-prepared for academic work at the university level or the type of entrepreneurial labor hopping the market now prefers; the private sector long ago stopped providing work-force training and instead that has been farmed out to the private sector who just happen to find millions of the aforementioned under-educated, under-employed, aspirational young adults to commodify.

That’s OUR fault. Or, that’s my argument and I’m sticking to it.

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“Eviction is for black women what incarceration is for black men”

21 Jan

It’s a provocative line in what promises to be some provocative scholarship.

I’d never thought of it before but instability in housing was very common among the young women I worked with in my previous life. And that’s no small thing. Many young women came to over-rely on their boyfriends and partners because they needed their support, however tenuous, to make rent at the first of the month. Sometimes these young men were nice and supportive. Sometimes they were not. When they were not the young women were faced not just with breaking up with a boyfriend but with losing their home. All of that can make pursuing post-secondary education particularly difficult. I continue to say that there is something in the data on single female headed households in for-profit school attendance that speaks to larger issues about how women are penalized for giving birth in this country. Eviction is likely part of that story. From the article:

Among young black men in America, about 10 percent are currently incarcerated. It’s shocking, but we’ve almost grown used to it.

But while those young men are in prison, what’s happening to their wives, girlfriends, mothers and sisters?

Eviction. A new study coming out of Milwaukee shows that eviction is for black women what incarceration is for black men. One in 20 households there are evicted every year. In predominately black communities, that rate doubles to 1 in 10 families.

For those of us who are affluent, with relatively stable incomes, we’ve never even had to think about what it would be like. — Megan Cottrell via True Slant

 

“You Can Do Anything!”

16 Jan

“No, I majored in poetry and clowning.”

At about 3:40 this becomes very funny in that “ouch, ouch, hit dog; hollering” kind of way. :D Status competition theory meet comedy.

http://www.nbc.com/assets/video/widget/widget.html?vid=1379100

Mitt Romney and For-profits

15 Jan

Today the Huffington Post features a story on Mitt Romney’s praising for-profit colleges for their affordability (Mitt Romney’s Rationale On For-Profit Colleges At Odds With Reality). Politics aside for a moment a commenter asked an interesting question:

For profit colleges are so great that how many of Mitt’s many kids went to one? Oh, they’re just for lower class people who can easily afford all that debt? How many for profit schools are in the top 100 of anything? Mitt seems like all sorts of ideas that take money from the lower half of the population and inject it into his people’s wallets. — ncsteeler

It’s a question that I had posed, rhetorically, many times. Last semester I tried to tackle a similar, answerable question (kids are not only off-limits but methodologically impossible) : How many for-profit colleges are led by graduates of for-profit colleges?

I found that of the 8 largest for-profit colleges only ONE is lead by someone who possesses a for-profit college degree. An excerpt from that paper:

Of the eight for-profits analyzed only three colleges are lead by presidents possessing a PhD. It is notable that two of those three for-profits are also the largest in the sector: University of Phoenix and Strayer University.  The third, Argosy, is one of the few for-profits to confer PhDs. Two of the for-profit presidents do not have a degree higher than a bachelor’s degree and one has an MBA. Also notable is that the biography of the president of ITT Technical Institute could not be located and the president of the eighth entry, Corinthian College is currently without a president having chosen not to replace the leader who resigned in October 2011 under contentious circumstances resulting from a federal investigation. Of the eight for-profit presidents only one possesses a degree from a for-profit college: Craig D. Swenson of Argosy University who earned a PhD from for-profit Walden University.

This could offer some interesting fodder for how much the for-profit industry values their own degrees. For-profits aren’t just schools, they’re major employers. Do they hire their own graduates?

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This will be the new and, hopefully, well-managed blog!

14 Jan

Just a summary of who I am, what I do, and what I have going on to get us started:

 

Despite overwhelming evidence that a college degree is not merely a political object but also a socially constructed object that is traded for economic and cultural capital there has been no scholarly attention paid to the legitimacy of for-profit college degrees.

I employ mixed methods to examine why students choose for-profit colleges, if for-profit credentials are socially construed as legitimate, and what these interactions means for social mobility and labor outcomes across and within national contexts.

As co-lead on a grant from the American Educational Research Association I am co-organizing, “Access, Opportunity, and For-Profit Higher Education” with the Research Network for Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke University in September 2012.

So, I’ll be posting content related to my research, academe, and this PhD grad school struggle life. Welcome.

 

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