Tressie McMillan Cottom - Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy

2017 by Tressie McMillan Cottom

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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2017

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ISBN 978-1-62097-102-4 (e-book)

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For everyone trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents,

but especially for the sisters.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

I n the first decade of the twenty-first century, as millions of Americans entered higher education, almost 30 percent of them went to for-profit colleges, and I enrolled at least a couple hundred of those students. I worked first at a cosmetology school and later at a technical college. I remember many of those studentstheir stories, their struggles, their daily successesbut Jason is the student who most changed my life. When I think of Jason now, I hope that he cant say the same of my impact on him.

When we met, Jason was in his early twenties. He was a local boy, born and raised in a rural suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina. At the time, Charlotte was a thriving urban core in the U.S. South. Its national stature, good quality of life, and strong labor markets relied significantly on the banking industry. As the banks went, so too went Charlottes economic fortunes. When I met Jason, the banks were posttechnology bubble but preglobal recession. I was an enrollment officer at the Technical College. It was one of a dozen for-profit colleges in the Charlotte area, each with slightly different branding. There was the for-profit college in high-end Southpark that only offered graduate degrees in business and technology. There was the all-male for-profit college over by the airport whose claim to fame was training mechanics to work at NASCAR. Then there were for-profit colleges in cosmetology, barbering, and what we would have once called secretarial programs. Like those other brands, the Technical College was located in a business park. This one was sandwiched between the high-end part of town and the growing middle-class subdivisions filling up with black and Hispanic families using low down-payment mortgages to escape the center city. The entire school occupied two floors of a six-story building. I had worked previously in a similar role at a cosmetology school (see ). Unlike the cosmetology school, the Technical College offered degrees instead of certificates: associates, bachelors, and masters degrees in technology, business, and criminal justice. Technology and business were very broadly defined. Technology included a program in electrical engineering that emphasized electrical more than engineering. The students learned business technology and how to wire common electrical units like those in household appliances instead of learning the math of engineering a structure with electricity. The business degree was applied, meaning it included everything from how to write a business memo to how to use accounting software like Quicken. The masters in business also included case studies in common business problems like managing bad publicity. Only the criminal justice curriculum was occupationally specific. The course had to qualify students to take the police exam, and, as a result, it had the most valuable real estate in the building. One entire classroom was set up like a crime scene.

When students like Jason came to visit, anyone who couldnt name a specific occupational interest or degree program was steered to technology or business. Only students who specifically asked for criminal justice were given information about that program. If you didnt know what you wanted a degree in or what kind of job you hoped to have, technology and business were deemed suitably general enough to tell you how much youd like them but specific enough to sound like something you heard on the news was a good job. Jason didnt know what he wanted a degree in, so I told him about technology and business. He chose technology because, he said, I always upgrade my phone.

Jason was newly married to his high school sweetheart, Bree, who attended each of his appointments with him. They held hands and prayed together before he enrolled. He was eloquent and earnest. They were members of one of the areas non-denominational megachurches that met in shopping centers and played rock music during worship. Between them, Jason and Bree had one truck, three jobs, and one high school diploma. She was working parttime and hoping to work full-time. They wanted a family and thought God was leading them to adopt a Kenyan child with special needs, as friends in their congregation had done. Jason had graduated from high school but suffered from severe test anxiety, which had caught up with him when he once enrolled in community college.

Jasons test anxiety was common enough among prospective students at the Technical College. It was also a potential roadblock to the stated purpose of my jobclosing the sale and helping the economy (more on this later)because the Technical College required an online skills test during the enrollment process. This was fairly rare among for-profit colleges, most of which have very few admission criteria (they are typically called openaccess schools). The Technical College used something called the Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test, best known for being the test that the National Football League uses to assess the IQ of new players. The fifty-question assessment purports to scale group intelligence scores and peg them to the average school grade. For example, a 20 on the Wonderlic is roughly equivalent to a 100 on an IQ test, or the baseline for average intelligence. The Technical College paid for a version of the Wonderlic that then correlated the IQ score with scholastic skill levels and provided a General Assessment of Instructional Needs (GAIN) score. For example, if this score were a 5, it meant that the test taker had the IQ of the typical fifth grader. To pass, prospective students at the Technical College had to score at least a 6. Prospective students could take the online assessment as many times as necessary to get a 6, and scores generally improved the more the test was taken. If all else failed, ambitious enrollment officers coached prospective students to make sure they passed. There was no real chance of failure. We never told the prospective student that. Instead, passing the Wonderlic became part of the motivational sales technique.