Lowering the Basement Floor: From Community Colleges to the For-Profit Revolution

Abstract

For-profit colleges have become a major force in higher education. They claim to offer a career-oriented practical education that is an alternative to community and four-year colleges. Often they fail to provide what they promise. Rather than being a new alternative, for-profits are the new basement floor of education, offering substandard educations at inflated prices. The primacy of profit motives and especially financialization means that for-profits are more like a financial instrument of neoliberal policies than educational institutions. Fueled by the reliance on federal student loans for operations expenses, educational aims are secondary to advertising and recruitment of a continuing supply of students without much regard for graduation rates. They appeal to first-generation students and recent immigrants with little information about higher education or the job market.

Notes

¹ David Glenn, “Annual Portrait of Education Documents Swift Rise of For-Profit Colleges,” Chronicle of Higher Education May 26, 2011,  < http://chronicle.com/article/Annual-Portrait-of-Education/127639/>.

² Anna Kamenetz, “The Profit Chase,” Slate, November 16, 2005. On the history of for-profits see Craig A. Honick, “The Story Behind Proprietary Schools in the United States,” New Directions for Community Colleges 91 (Fall 1995), pp. 27–40.

³ For example see Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State and Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2009); Jennifer Washburn, University Inc: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (New York: Basic, 2006); Gaye Tuchman, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

⁴ Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity 1900–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

⁵ Ibid., 2.

⁶ Burton Clark, The Open Door College: A Case Study (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960); and Burton Clark, “The Cooling Out Function in Higher Education,” American Journal ofSociology 65:6 (1960), pp. 569–576. For Goffman see Erving Goffman, “Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaption to Failure,” Psychiatry XV (November 1952), pp. 451–462.

⁷ Brint and Karabel, The Diverted Dream, p. 7.

⁸ Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976). On ungovernability see Michael Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975).

⁹ The Nixon administration program is documented in Ira Shor, Culture Wars: School and Society in Conservative Restoration 1969–84 (New York: Routledge and Kagan Paul, 1987). A more recent analysis of vocationalization is Henry Giroux “Neo-liberalism and the Vocationalization of Higher Education,” Workplace 5:1, 2002, < http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles/vocalization.htm>.

¹⁰ Shor, Culture Wars, Chapter 1 develops this theme.

¹¹ J.M. Beach, Gateway to Opportunity: A History of the Community College in the United States (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2011), p. 32.

¹² Brint and Karabel, The Diverted Dream, p. 102.

¹³ Ami Zusman, “Challenges Facing Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century,” in P. G. Altbach, R.O. Berdahl, and P.J. Gumport (eds), American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 115–160.

¹⁴ Beach, Gateway to Opportunity, p. 60.

¹⁵ Miguel A Centeno and Joseph N. Cohen, “The Arc of Neo-liberalism,” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (August 2012), p. 321.

¹⁶ A summary of various senses is found in Natasha Van der Swan, “Making Sense of Financialization,” Socio-Economic Review 12:1 (2004), pp. 99–129.

¹⁷ Mark Olssen, “In Defense of the Welfare State and of Publicly Provided Education,” Journal of Educational Policy 11:3 (1996), pp. 337–362, cited in Michael W. Apple “Creating Difference: Neo-Liberalism, Neo-Conservatism and the Politics of Educational Reform,” Educational Policy 18:1 (2004), p. 21.

¹⁸ Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). Among his many works see Zygmut Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Malden, MA: Polity, 2006). There is a burgeoning discussion on the notion of the precarity of neoliberal society. For example see Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic 2011). For a more Foucauldian reading of these processes using the notion of governmentality, see Stephen C. Ward, Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education (New York: Routledge, 2012), Chapter 1.

¹⁹ Van der Swan, “Making Sense of Financialization.”

²⁰ Suzanne Mettler, Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2014), p. 37.

²¹ Goldie Blumentstyk, “For-Profit Colleges Attract a Gold Rush of Investors,” Chronicle of Higher Education (March 2003). The value of these stocks has dropped in more recent years.

²² Mathew A. McGuire, “Subprime Education: For-Profit Colleges and the Problem with Title IV Federal Student Aid,” Duke Law Journal 62 (October 2012), p. 121.

²³ Spelling Commission on Higher Education, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of Higher Education (US Department of Education, 2006), p. xiv.

²⁴ Andrew Rosen, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy (New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2011); Robert M. Shireman, “‘Change.edu’ and the Problem with For-Profits,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 2012.

²⁵ George Keller, “Foreword,” in Richard S. Ruch (ed.), Higher Ed Inc: The Rise of the For-Profit University (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins, 2001), p. xi.

²⁶ Adam Weinstein, “How Pricey For–Profit Colleges Target Vets' GI Bill Money,” Mother Jones (Sep/Oct 2011).

²⁷ Glenn, “Annual Portrait of Education,” < http://chronicle.com/article/Annual-Portrait-of-Education/127639/>.

²⁸  < http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/08/the-rise-of-forprofit-colleges.html>.

²⁹ “Harkin Calls on For-Profit Colleges to End Deceptive Recruiting Practices,” Press Release, February 8, 2011, < http://harkin.senate.gov/press/release.cfm?i = 330975>.

³⁰ Adam Weinstein, “How Pricey For-Profit Colleges Target Vets' GI Bill Money.” Mother Jones September/October 2011 accessed on the web at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/gi-bill-for-profit-colleges.

³¹ David Halperin, “Why Did For-profit College Stocks Rise after the Gainful Employment Rule was Released?” Campus Progress, June 3, 2011. See also Tamar Lewin, “Student Loan Default Rates Rise Sharply in Past Year,” New York Times, September 12, 2011.

³² Carl Straumshein, “Induced to Fail,” Inside Higher Education, February 24, 2014, < http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/24/former-nursing-students-sue-excelsior-college-over-deceptive-or-misleading-practices>.

³³ GAO, “Undercover Testing Finds Colleges Encouraged Fraud and Engaged in Deceptive and Questionable Marketing Practices,” Governmental Accountability Office (August 2010).

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ “Harkin Calls on For-Profit Colleges to End Deceptive Recruiting Practices.”

³⁶ Jeffrey J. Williams, “Debt Education: Bad for the young Bad for America,” Dissent (Summer 2006).

³⁷ Mamie Lynch, Jennifer Engel, and Jose L. Cruz, Subprime Opportunity: The Unfulfilled Promise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities (The Education Trust, November 2010), p. 7.

³⁸ James R. Osamudia, “Predatory Ed: The Conflict Between Public Good and For-Profit Higher Education,” Journal of College and University Law 38:1 (2011), p. 68. Also see Amy Sepinwall, “Education by Corporation: The Merits and Perils of For-Profit Higher Education for a Democratic Citizenry,” in Greg Urban (ed.), Corporations and Citizenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), < http://works.bepress.com/amysepinwall/13>.

³⁹ Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

⁴⁰ Bill Readings, The University In Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1997).

⁴¹ A related point has be made by Nancy Fraser in her discussion of the conflicts of the neoliberal state: “Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Toward a Neo-Polanyian Conception of Capitalist Crisis,” Unpublished; also see Rocio Zambrana, “Paradoxes of Neo-Liberalism and the Tasks of Critical Theory,” Critical Horizons 14:1 (2013), pp. 93–119.

⁴² Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).

⁴³ This is C. Wright Mills' formulation in The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford, 2000).

⁴⁴ See Henry Giroux and Susan Giroux, Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). The Girouxs draw their notion from Cornelius Castoriadis, “Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime,” Constellations 4:1 (1997), pp. 1–18.

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Brian Caterino

Brian Caterino is an independent scholar who works in public media in Rochester, New York. He holds an MA and a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto and is co-editor (with Sanford Schram) of Making Political Science Matter as well as a chapter in Perestroika: The Raucous Revolt in Political Science. He has published a number of articles and reviews in a number of journals on interpretive methods and critical theory.