Summary Of Lower Ed The Troubling Rise Of For-Profit Colleges

Society has a very skewed opinion of what college is, how it should look, and what each individual type of person should experience while in college. In Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, she investigates what for-profit colleges are to modern society and how they affect various types of lives. She does this by placing herself into different social roles to put into perspective to her audience the different types of lives that affected by for-profit colleges, the role of for-profit colleges in personal and professional settings, and why she personally understands what for-profit schools are by being in these roles.

Cottom takes her societal roles in two directions. The first is

She not only makes known that she is an African American woman who grew up in that culture, but also that she sees the way certain cultures have generationally responded to college. She also realizes how different every culture is, even in the same vicinity of each other, so she clarifies that she “could say the words ‘student loan refund check’ to African Americans with any postsecondary education experience and likely be understood… [she] was so certain about the salience of the term that in writing this book it never occurred to [her] to explain it” until she began to mention it to people outside of the African American culture (Cottom, 71). Cottom is addressing her own humanness here to show that she is still just like everyone else, however she is also pulling it back in to professionalism here by recognizing her vast audience and taking the time to fully explain what she means to get her point across with the way for-profit schools work and how college affects everyone differently. She wants to show her audience her own side to the college story, but also the side of many people who are targets for for-profit colleges just by their ethnicity. She also goes into this by revealing that she is a former for-profit college employee and was involved in the process of recruiting potential students. Cottom explains that “Women who carry the burden of primary childcare, men working more than one job, older adults caring for both their parents and their own children – a group for whom time isn’t just money, but the absence of money” were her targets (Cottom, 38). The people who seemed to “not” have their lives together, people who were from poorer demographics, people who did not have what many call the ideal life are the targets for for-profit schools. Cottom is finally placing herself in this role because she wants to