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

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom

"The best book yet on the complex lives and choices of for-profit students."
--The New York Times Book Review

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 Lower Ed is quickly becoming the definitive book on the fastest-growing sector of higher education at the turn of the twenty-first century: for-profit colleges. With sharp insight and deliberate acumen, Tressie McMillan Cottom--a sociologist who was once a recruiter at two for-profit colleges--expertly parses the fraught dynamics of this big-money industry.

Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with students, employees, executives, and activists, Lower Ed details the benefits, pitfalls, and real costs of the expansion of for-profit colleges. Now with a new foreword by Stephanie Kelton, economic advisor to Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign, this smart and essential book cuts to the very core of our nation's broken social contracts and the challenges we face in our divided, unequal society.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Press
  • Publish Date: Aug 7th, 2018
  • Pages: 240
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.40in - 0.80in - 0.60lb
  • EAN: 9781620974384
  • Categories: Philosophy, Theory & Social AspectsSchools - Levels - HigherEducational Policy & Reform

About the Author

Cottom, Tressie McMillan: - Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of Lower Ed (The New Press). Her work has been featured by the Washington Post, NPR's Fresh Air, The Daily Show, the New York Times, Slate, and The Atlantic, among others.

Praise for this book

Praise for Lower Ed:
The best book yet on the complex lives and choices of for-profit students.
--The New York Times Book Review [A] bracing study of the for-profits.
--The New York Review of Books

Cottom does a good job of making the name Lower Ed stick, and she makes a solid case for reviewing the entire system of higher education for openness of opportunity.
--Kirkus Reviews

In Lower Ed McMillan Cottom is at her very best--rigorous, incisive, empathetic, and witty. . . . Her sharp intelligence, throughout, makes this book compelling, unforgettable, and deeply necessary.
--Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women and Bad Feminist

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

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the market forces currently transforming higher education. It is an eye-opening portrait of this burgeoning educational sector and the ways in which its rapid expansion is linked to skyrocketing inequality and growing labor precarity in the twenty-first-century United States.
--Ruth Milkman, past president of the American Sociological Association

In a sea of simplistic and often bombastic critiques of American higher education, Tressie McMillan Cottom's trenchant analysis of Lower Ed stands out. As the Trump administration moves to make life ever easier for the nation's for-profit colleges, this book offers the most powerful form of resistance--detailed storytelling of the causes and consequences of this big-money industry. Anyone frustrated with high college prices, student debt, or the diminishing sense of hope surrounding so many communities needs to read this book.
--Sara Goldrick-Rab, author of Paying the Price and professor of higher education policy at Temple 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

[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