tressiemc

Someone with more time and money than me has created a great web resource for potential students about the difference in missions among institutional types. Now y’all can stop sending all your cousins to talk to me.:)

From: www.forprofitu.org

Visit www.forprofitu.org for more clear, insightful information like this:

Q: I’ve never heard of Education Management Corporation. What is it?

A: Education Management Corporation (EDMC) ranks as one of the largest for-profit education companies. Based in Pittsburgh, it runs 105 colleges across the country. Lots of students, lots of money.

Q: Why should I care that my college is operated by a corporation?

A: As a corporation, EDMC’s CEO and Board of Directors are influenced by Wall Street, and their mission is to make a profit. Education may be secondary. How do they make a profit? They get federal student loans and tuition payments of students. Then they spend some on students’ education and the rest is profit. This often comes at the expense of students, who accumulate mountains of debt from student loans and can often fail to graduate with a degree. Unlike at non-profit colleges and universities, your student payments are going towards the profit of a company, rather than only towards your education.

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

 

“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. Status competition theory meet comedy.

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

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.