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.