Lower Ed

Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges

As featured on The Daily Show, NPR’s Marketplace, and Fresh Air, the “powerful, chilling tale” (Carol Anderson, author of White Rage) of higher education becoming an engine of social inequality

The best book yet on the complex lives and choices of for-profit students.

Dana Goldstein for the New York Times Book Review

Praise for Lower Ed

“[A] profound examination of the role of for-profit colleges in the emerging, ‘new’ American economic landscape. This is the best book I’ve read on for-profit (or shareholder) colleges and universities.” —William A. Darity Jr., professor of economics, public policy, and African American studies at Duke University

“Lower Ed is brilliant. It is nuanced, carefully argued, and engagingly written. It is a powerful, chilling tale of what happens when profit-driven privatization of a public good latches on to systemic inequality and individual aspirations.” —Carol Anderson, author of White Rage and professor of African American studies at Emory University

“With passion, eloquence, and data too, McMillan Cottom charts the harm we are doing to our youth, to higher education, and to democracy itself.” —Cathy N. Davidson, author of Now You See It and founding director of the Futures Initiative at the City University of New York