 I'm ridiculously pleased to be introducing Tressy McMillan-Cotton. Tressy is a fourth year PhD candidate in sociology at Emory University. She studies inequality in rapidly changing social domains like education, new media and technology. This summer she's a PhD intern at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research in New England just down the street. If you do not know Tressy already, do yourself a favor. After this talk is over, go to TressyMC.com, click on most red essays and then work your way down that list. You will come to understand exactly why in 2013 the nation named for a top feminist writer of the year and the Huffington Post included her in their list of best publications of the year. You will also learn a lot, at least I did. Yesterday, as she put a primer post for today's talk and in case you missed it, I'm just going to quote the key paragraph I thought, which is, she says, I talk to students that are cobbling together alternative higher education models of disruption as they live at intersecting processes of inequality regimes. This is the counter history of disruption that isn't about roaming autodidacts, but about rank and file women and women trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents financed at 6.21% and amortized over 15 years. Tressy has a book coming out, Lower Ed, the for profit college fix from the new press. Thank you very, very much. Thank you very much. It's always so odd to remember that there are people on the other side of all that stuff. The only way that I know how to respect my audience is to pretend that you don't exist when I'm writing. Yeah, don't assume anything about you. I pretend like it's not there. I really approach it that way. These things happen and I'm like, oh yeah, there are people in that machine and they have sometimes been to the website and they have read and I'm very appreciative of that. I'd like to thank Tim for that very kind introduction and for reading the website and directing everyone else there. I'd also like to thank everyone connected here with the Berkman Center for inviting me and I will also start with a couple of personal programming notes. A couple of things that you should know about me. I always tell my students to interrogate the researcher, interrogate the person in the text. So if we assume that this is all some big living text, I'll save you time. That way you don't have to try to figure out where I'm coming from. I'll just tell you. One, I'm a sociologist. That means I think that groups are a level of analysis. Also means that I think about things like inequality and stratification. I might want to know that I am Southern both by culture and by choice and so for our purposes... Thank you very much. And so for our purposes here today, what that means maybe for you is that I'm perfectly comfortable. I come from a call and response tradition. That means you do not have to sit out there and me up here, you can feel free to be in dialogue as I go through the talk. The only thing that I will say is that if at times I say, well, we might be coming to that or I really, really want to kind of do as the Q&A as efficiently as possible, I may ask you to hold off if I think that we might cover it in some other way. But other than that, I know we all come from different disciplinary norms but that tends to be mine, okay? Let's see. So, oh, one other programming note. I always have to think my very generous primary funder for her ongoing support. That would be my mother, Vivian, who I think is at home now watching this streaming live if she figured out what streaming is. And so everybody will say hello, Vivian. Y'all just got me out of a Christmas gift. So I think... So a quick lay of the land of how I hope that this will go. So, first I'm going to start kind of broad, right? By what I mean by inequality regimes, democratizing ideologies. After I put the description of the talk together for Burkman, I thought that is really clunky sounding. And it is. But I hope it's specific enough in a way that it facilitates a very specific kind of conversation. So I'm always trying to do that dance between using disciplinary language and jargon in these really specific terms and trying to keep the conversation as open to as many people from different disciplinary backgrounds as possible. I'll try to walk that line here today. Again, you can always feel free to call me out on that as we make our way through. So broadly, I'll start with what do I mean by those things. And I'm going to juxtapose that against where I think we are in this broader sort of social, cultural, political moment, right? And this is where I think we are. We've got unprecedented access to information, to services, to markets. And that's almost entirely a function of technological change. But we are also living in an ideological moment of this idea of meritocracy that is really all too happy to assume that all of the what I call technocratic solutionism, which we'll talk about a little bit what I mean by that, right? That it will just sort of magically erase persistent inequalities, particularly as they relate to group inequality, right? We just don't talk about it in this cultural moment. So we build tools, part of my argument is we build tools that do not consider it. And not considering inequality is not the same as they're not being inequality. It just means you cannot observe it, measure it, or theorize it. And so when you cannot measure it, theorize it, theorize it, or observe it, what you really end up doing is perpetuating it, right? It will be sort of my larger argument. Now my personal work has focused on higher education, especially emerging higher education models. And I talk a lot about for-profit colleges in my work as being sort of the ideal type of market-based higher education models, right? And so when I say for-profit colleges, does it ring a bell with anyone in the room? Yeah, so the University of Phoenix, Strayer, get off your couch, call today, start tomorrow. Alright. Now there's work in that area and there's a reason why I choose to do that but my work in particular talks about sort of how race, class, and gender sort of intersect with what kind of students are making the choice to attend these sort of emerging higher education models which are almost entirely being devised and funded in the private sector. These are market-based solutions to what people will say is an unmet consumer demand for higher education. That's the line you kind of hear, right? So the spoiler alert version of that work again very broadly is this, as there have been fewer good jobs with good wages, workers want to earn credentials to try to stay afloat, right? Where that intersects with my work is that the more dire the job prospects are, whether they think that is the case in reality or whether people perceive that their prospects are particularly dire, right, be that due to any kind of systemic bias, right? Racism, sexism, classism, ableism, what have you in the labor market, the more insecure people feel the more they're willing to pay for the credential, right? That's just the short version of the takeaway. So I spent a lot of time doing things like reading SEC filings. The for-profit colleges have filed over the last 20 years. Thank you. And I love them. I really do. And I actually suggest that you do it. I call them really great examples of creative nonfiction. Because think about what they have to do, right? They've got to both sell you and imagine what they will be without making any promises that they can be held too liable for. I mean that takes some really creative sort of language and sort of manipulation of things in these documents. But it also gives you a really keen insight into how they view their role in sort of the overall process of things, right? And so one of the things that comes out when you're reading the ones that are being filed around like the mid-1990s to 2000, 2001, which was this really condensed period of sort of financialization in the sector. Lots of money being poured into for-profit colleges and expanding them. That's why you woke up one day and saw the commercials everywhere, right? For-profit colleges that already existed, they just sort of permeated our awareness one day. Felt like you woke up and they were everywhere. That's what happened. A lot of money got poured into them. Kevin Kiesner calls it a Wall Street era of for-profit colleges. Well, you read them and one of the things I like is they always have to list who they think their major competitors are in the market, right? Because this is about perspective investors and kind of getting the idea of the company's position. And so what you would suspect that a school would list other schools as their primary competitors. And some of them do, right? But some of them say, no, we're not really competing with the community college down the street. Or they say, well, yeah, no, there are a couple of other for-profit colleges in the area and they might prove to be some competition. But overwhelmingly, what they cite as their primary competition is jobs and military service. They're competing with jobs and military service. My takeaway from this is that the business plan is about expanding access to higher education. It's a democratizing ideology, right? Greater access. But the business plan absolutely is aware that what it is selling is relative to inequality. They know that inequality is part of the business plan, yeah? The fact that we don't know it and don't study it that way is something that I just kind of hope to address in my own work. But access to information in this sort of understanding in the creative non-fiction ends up conflated with education and equality of outcomes, yes? Yeah, so the question was to what extent does inequality get perpetuated by students taking on student loans that they first of all at a high rate and at high aggregate amounts and then with the lower ability to repay them due to job market outcomes, yes? And the for-profit sector overall? Yeah, so we're gonna want to tease apart a couple of things. So when I talk about, so online education is not the same as for-profit colleges, there's a significant overlap because of sort of the technological history of for-profit colleges, right? So we kind of want to separate those out. But if we just talk about the difference between students who are attending a for-profit college and attending a not-for-profit traditional form of higher education, when we hold constant things like race, class, and gender, actually their dropout rates are comparable to those in community colleges although their students would do better usually in a traditional four-year college. So it becomes a really complicated picture that suggests actually my overall point that inequality matters. It matters where students are starting as much as it matters to what they're getting once they're in the institution. But now none of that has anything to do with the fact that if you drop out and you owe $6,000 that is a much different position for you than if you drop out and you owe $60,000, right? So all of that is always relative. So one of my arguments in the ongoing conversation about student loan debt is that we think about debt as an absolute number and debt is actually always relative. The experience of the debt is relative, right? My $100,000 student loan debt is not going to be the same as somebody's $100,000 student loan debt coming out of Harvard Law School, quite frankly. Right? Okay, so it's relative. It's relative to where I started and it's relative to my expected outcomes. One we know about where I start, the other we're always having to make assumptions about. Right? Yeah. So that's what it is a primary means by which, yes, that inequality ends up reinforcing itself. Absolutely, it's what I would argue. So that's what I'm talking about there. So what do I mean though by inequality regimes? It's some matters we kind of move through because I am talking about something really specific. So some of you may be familiar with this word but I'm borrowing really heavily here from a rich literature on organizations and inequality that has particularly looked at race and class and gender and it's just this idea that there are practices and processes that are interlocking that create and reproduce class, gender and racial inequality in various combinations. The various combinations part matters because overwhelmingly what we tend to do in the literature especially the current literature about higher education and inequality to the extent that when we do look at things like people starting location and like their social location where they originate, we look at race, we look at class, we have a gender, we have these quantitative measures for that, right? And we tend to look at those independently from each other, right? So what we end up saying is, for instance, there's a paper out that says well no, race is not a significant predictor for enrollment in for profit colleges but then that makes it really hard for us to explain why African American and Hispanic students are overrepresented in for profit colleges, right? So I say that this is not an issue with understanding the quantitative measures, it's that we reduce inequality to a single measure, right? When you start to look at those things in combination or how they intersect you actually get a much different empirical picture. And what we think about that analytically is looking at inequality regimes in these organizational contexts, where you choose to go to school, what happens to you when you get there and how people respond to and perceive to you once you leave, we get a much different picture of how that inequality works. Now I tend to look at this broadly, I've looked at how this works in on-campus programs, right? My work this summer has looked at this more specifically how this works when those programs are happening online. So when these relationships are digitally mediated we already know that something happens when we're online. So we tend to collapse space and time, right? Things, those concepts tend to work a little more differently. That's why a lot of people choose to go online, quite frankly. They get to collapse time and space in ways that are convenient for their lives, right? If you are working and you cannot afford to opt out of the labor market while you pursue another credential, especially if the point of you getting the credential again is fear about job insecurity, right? What you're trying to do when you take those classes online is you're trying to take advantage of the ways that the technology collapse those things, right? Now that's what we get from the literature. I think a broader story when we think about inequality regimes is what would motivate different people differently to need to do that, right? This is where these inequality regimes as an analytical framework become really important and I say that this is a really great way for us to disentangle how things like the platform, the social media, whether you're taking it online or not the content and the ideology all kind of get collapsed into one thing analytically and if we think about it this way we can start to tease those differences apart. Now you see this tension between what I call access ideologies and inequality across all kinds of social domains. We're seeing in healthcare, right? Anybody remember the big debate about the efficiency of the ACA marketplace website, right? We got so caught up in the fact that it wasn't as efficient as we like that we kind of lost sight of the fact that there was some really serious warning shots that were fired a year prior about who even had access to and could navigate and could enroll online. Why we were depending so heavily on online access as a point of access for people who were most likely to be uninsured or temporarily under insured were generally coming from demographics inequality regimes that made their access to online technologies less likely, right? That conversation gets lost when we focus on the platform but these things like how inequality and ideologies then work together isn't just specific to education. Again, this is probably what I think is this larger moment, healthcare political participation. Not sure anybody has been following the debate recently the New York Times has decided to take up a polling, opinion polling, sampling. They're going to take some up from a company that uses online only participation to do participant observation, right? Of political opinion. The debate being who are, is this representative of who we are when we do this extreme amount of self-selection at the front end of the process. So we see this happening in political participation. We see it happening in housing and employment but I think in the higher education context we get a really great comment on the gap between what we think we're doing when we increase access and what really happens when we think about inequality. This is from Jimmy Wells at Wikipedia. He says, imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Doesn't get much more aspirational of an ideology than that, right? One, the idea that we've got a sum of all human knowledge I think would be news to some people. But the other thing that I really like is this turn about every single person on the planet getting free access, right? Not groups of people but every single person. Every single person. I think underneath this all is this thing that permeates all the sort of emerging sort of higher education disruption models. I think this is what's underlying I believe in MOOCs as a disruptive model that this is what underpins our belief in for-profit colleges as this disruptive model, right? And it's this idea that if there are any differences among persons it's about individual differences. And we can cure that if we've just got more information and access. Somehow access becomes education becomes information, right? We start to conflate them as the same thing. Well as a sociologist, first of all I think some educational psychologists will have issues with that. I know some and I know that they do but as a sociologist I would take some issue with that. One is this idea that information is the education right? That information is the education right? We know that education is about what you bring from your social context that allows you to scaffold new information onto what you know, right? That's not about information it's about where you begin and how you can then internalize it and synthesize it, right? That's an inherently social process is what we found right? Now we can define social kind of broadly but we know that information alone doesn't get you there, right? We also know that information is sort of culturally relative. What's considered important information in one cultural context can be quite different in another. And again we've got all this literature and have had it for a very long time. There's no real empirical reason that we should want to conflate access of information to education but I would say that there's an ideological reason for people to want us to conflate the two. So if you end up here we get what I think is the heart of the tension between ideologies and inequalities and it's something that Justin Reich actually brought up. He did a talk here a few weeks ago about MOOCs and the science of learning that I was fortunate enough to attend and he made this really excellent point about the limitations of all of that data that MOOCs are producing, right? They get data scientists and computational scientists really really excited, right? Because they're talking about huge amounts of data. I think he said something about terabytes, right? And the room kind of shimmered a little, right? So these data are really great. You got people from all over the world taking them and we say, right? And we know so much about them and could know more if we use different types of technologies. And Justin kind of slowed it down and I really appreciate it. He said, well, you know, this data is really great about analyzing things like tasks, like how long you stay on a website video, how long you watch a video clip, how long it takes you to respond to a question. He said, but it's actually not that great at figuring out what people have learned, right? And I appreciated that. And that is because, again, what people learn and what they know is quite different from these discrete tasks, these discrete bytes of information. But by and large the platforms that are underpinning some of most of our higher education disruption models, and I just like saying disruption because other people like saying it so much is this very idea that that's what learning can be reduced to, these tasks. So we get beyond even the single person in this model. We're not even talking persons anymore, right? We're talking routine tasks that we can break them out. Well, I think that when we break out tasks from the person, we not only lose the person, but we lose their cultural and social context, right? So how we decide to collect data becomes a political and ideological kind of tool that dissolves all of that stuff that a lot of people would really rather not think about anyway. Quite frankly we're a little fatigued with the whole inequality train. I'll be honest with you, right? I mean, maybe you guys aren't. Maybe you're the good eggs. But seriously, there is not a significant amount of interesting more and kind of thinking about the ways in which different groups of people have different amounts of access to things, right? This is why we like to think about solving the access problem will also solve the inequality problem. I think people would prefer to talk about access than they would inequality because that is a much, much tougher nut to crack. So again, Justin made this point last week, but he also, and he made another one that I really liked. He said well, not only are we reproducing sort of you know, these inequalities when we don't consider where the people are kind of coming from, when we focus instead on these discrete tasks and that's what most of this work is done. He said but since we're then using that information to sort of refine the platforms and the digital tools, what we end up doing is risking tooling these models to the norm is how I think he said it, right? That we'll end up retrofitting it to the norm. And I really like this idea of the norm because what is it exactly? We have some idea of what it is, and this is what I call it, roaming autodidacts. These models are designed for really, right? But this is the norm that we're assuming in a lot of technological innovation and that we're building into the platforms and retooling to retrofit. The roaming autodidact is this idea that there is this ideal self-motivated able learner that is somehow simultaneously embedded in the future, always in the future of education, the jobs of the 21st century, the education of the 21st century, but are simultaneously disembed from anything like place, culture, history, markets even, or inequality regimes. These people come to these learning tasks without any of this, and they pick up information, turn it into learning and education by some magic of the platform. We're able to then disaggregate that, to measure it, and then to respond. The roaming autodidact. I really like the roaming autodidact because I say if you're tooling and designing tools for this person, you've got some issues, people like to talk about scale, you don't get to scale with this person. If you could get to scale with this person, we never would have came up with schools as institutions, quite frankly. This is why we have institutional spaces. Just to put that in terms of what sometimes my market folks like, you're not going to get to scale this way. What you are going to get, I think, is a tool that then is used to measure the efficacy of the non-roaming autodidact and are constantly going to find them at fault for not meeting this norm that's built into the platform of how we then understand learning and education. I say that is probably likely to look a lot like the students that I talk to. My students don't roam much. I don't talk to a lot of roaming autodidact, but they do roost. When you can't just roam about the world unencumbered, you tend to be embedded in these larger social processes, and you tend to be looking for a place as much as you are a space. They don't tend to roam around. I tend to talk to students who are enrolled again in for-profit colleges. They are more likely to be black, to be Latino, to be first generation college students. They are more likely to be poor, so they need things like pale grants and student loan money to pay for it. These are, again, not roaming IDECs who are just looking for information or even just looking for education. They are looking for credentials because what they are really looking for is mobility. Again, we don't even get to that conversation with the roaming autodidact. They never are concerned about upward mobility. They are already always where they are going to be because, again, they are in the future. They are not here. They are not past. They are in the future. You don't need mobility there. These are the students that I talk to. Now I will talk a little bit about my broader project, some of what I have worked on this summer, and then we will move. I am happy to open it up then to Q&A. Again, in my dissertation work and the work that has been forming, the book project I have talked to about 60 or 70 students currently enrolled in a for-profit degree granting institution. I have talked to them about things about how they made those choices. How they make meaning of them. How they now feel about it now that they are in that context. I will talk about what the admissions process was like. What that financial aid process was like. What the classroom experience is like. I will talk about how they think their employers are going to respond to their education and how their peer networks, their friends and their family members have received their educational choices. By and large, I am talking to women because women are overrepresented in all of higher education, but that is more acute as you start to get into non-traditional forms. What they are telling me is things like I was interested in picking up physics always had an interest. This is the kind of narrative that emerges again from some of the coverage on emerging higher education models. They have plenty of interest. Don't get me wrong, but that is not what is motivating them to participate. Instead they tell me stories about how they have worked on a call center floor for eight years and they have seen all of the men, disproportionately men up to things like supervisors and managers and when you do that you are less likely to work shift work. If they can stop working shift work, they can be home when their kids get home from school. It seems like most of those people have a college degree and they decided they should get one too. They are talking about job insecurity and they are talking about motherhood penalties, they are talking about persistent gender wage gaps and they are talking about educational inequities that got ramped up from their K-12 preparation. They are talking about low expectations of them, gendered norms of what it means to perform as a good mother and a good wife at home and they are talking about how all of that constrains the choices available to them to get a degree. These are not roaming all of the DACs. I would also point out that they are the majority of all college students. They are the projected normal actually for traditional higher education. We assume that by 2020 most students will be like the types of students that I talk to. They will most certainly be browner, more likely to be women and they will be more likely to be older or have families. So the students I talk to are actually the students a lot of us will be teaching in a few years and so I think it behooves us to understand them a little better. And again I also think it behooves us to understand how is it that we are imagining a higher education future that doesn't include them. What are we saying about what that will mean? If all of our visions of a higher education future is not at all about this student what about this one? That's the minority and this is the majority. We are making a pretty clear ideological statement about who a higher education is for. So what do I know about some of these students? So I told you about them on campus spaces. This summer however I have been looking at students who are attending online programs and how they are using social media platforms to try to navigate some of those shortages that they find in their own campus programs. So those are shortages like very limited time to do the sort of social networking and develop the sort of social and cultural capital that we know helps turn information into education. So when you are doing an accelerated program in a non-traditional higher education format even though you are sharing the same physical space the students that I talk to say they don't spend a lot of time with each other. They spend even less time with faculty and administrators. Some of that is just about the geography of the space. We are not talking about sprawling campuses. These are usually occupying one or two floors of an office building in the light. So we are not talking about there being a lot of physical space for congregating and there is also not a lot of time to do so. Again the programs are accelerated the courses are accelerated. You are in class from six to nine at night. There isn't a whole lot of time to hang out in a quad so to speak. And those were some of those social interactions are likely to happen. So I started asking okay so then where do you get this from if you get it at all? If we take the idea of space out of the equation entirely and we look at students who are not just doing this on campus but who are doing it online you get some of my students who are in a group that I call swag. That's because they say it about themselves. And it's an acronym for successful women achieving greatness. And it's a support group that says it is for women who are pursuing a PhD. And what I find really interesting about that is that it's open to all women pursuing a PhD. But the group is comprised of over 80% of the students are from for-profit schools. They're actually overwhelmingly from two for-profit schools. So there are already a lot of self-selection that suggests that there's something about participating in this form this higher education context that has led people to seek out sort of social supports in online spaces. They're all pursuing their PhDs in an online program. And I focus on PhDs because we think of this as high educational attainment. If we looked at this as just a quantitative measure once they're done we'd say, well now here's a woman who has a PhD and here's another one that does and we wouldn't look at the qualitative differences between them at all. So we have to look at the qualitative differences of how they achieved it and what kind of social stuff happened along that process is part of my larger argument. And once you get a look at who the students in the group are you get things like almost they're overwhelmingly married and have children or at least are partnered and that's a cross race with some differences by race. So that gives you some idea again of what type of sort of social patterns they're dealing with. So again they're dealing with motherhood they're dealing with the responsibilities of being a wife or female partner in a couple that comes with all of these expectations. They are supporting a family or at least are contributing to a household budget that should support a family. Many of them are dealing with relationship arrangements that are not particularly supportive of them pursuing an education. And so they have to take a lot of measures to make sure that they work the education around the role instead of changing their role in the relationship to work around their education. So by virtue of who they are, the members of SWAG have chosen an institutional affiliation. They've self selected into a college type absolutely. But again my argument is that who they are greatly conditioned what options they were able to self select into. And that we have to look at who they are to get at that information. And when we don't even collect that data much less analyze it then we lose all of this. So some preliminary analysis of what I know of how they use some of these spaces. So the first is that they are absolutely trying to make a place in these digital spaces. They do have some sense that they are missing out on the social connections and that having those social connections would make the education more fruitful for them. Trying to figure out how to create that though is very interesting. So you have someone like Jay who talks about how in her online program used to be obligated to comment on each other's posts in their online classes. It was part of their grade. Students complained about that however and so they didn't want to do. And the students in her courses by the way she says she doesn't necessarily know the gender and class embrace makeup of the other students. But she has some sense that it was the students who were doing really well in class who didn't feel obligated to comment on each other's content. She said so they stopped. It's no longer mandated that the students have to interact with each other in this way in the online classes. And she said you know I really missed that. She said there was no way for me to measure my progress. If I don't know what my fellow students were doing I don't know how I'm doing. She said so when they stopped this she had to seek this out elsewhere. So I asked her okay well the schools would love for them to use their corporate social media sites to do this. They have set them up. They have Facebook and Twitter feeds. They have proprietary private networks like Yammer that they use. They would like other students to use. One it gives them a better window into how their customers are perceiving their experience. It becomes a data mining exercise. Jay and Al and the other students I've talked to thus far want to use them in that way. When I asked them why this is not about a choice necessarily about platform but about who they are. She said there's no way I would want to be in a group and talk about these things that matter to me. Yeah I like that too. She said so would you talk about these issues. She was having some problems with her financial aid. She had exceeded her federal financial aid loan limits but she had not yet completed her degree. This is again about the context. She has financed $180,000 so far. So she's out of money that she can borrow that way. She needed to go to the private student loan market to finish. Very committed to finishing her degree. She comes to the online support group and I've watched this conversation unfold. Other members of the group immediately come to her aid. One to commiserate with her experience. Others to say no I've been in that position too. So one it becomes normalized for her through interacting with students in the group. And then they start to turn to tacit and explicit information about how to overcome the problem. So they give her the name of a private student loan company and somebody else echoes in and says no I've used them. They're actually pretty good. So right it gets legitimized by your networks. Her peers have used it. They're on the up and up. And then somebody else comes along and says don't be too worried about your credit yet. It needs to be good enough. But I had a couple issues on my credit report and I was still able to get a loan at this interest rate. So they're revealing that private algorithm of credit underwriting to each other. She gets some idea of whether or not it's even worth the risk of time and investment for her to pursue. And she does end up getting by the way to continue her degree program. I ask her well would you have discussed this in the other forums? And she said no. And she says no look I didn't even want to put my picture of my avatar. People told me not to do this in the online classes. She's like because they'll know that I'm a black woman. And that comes with a whole lot of baggage. And it particularly comes with baggage relative to class. And if I start talking about how I've got money issues. I've got concerns about my credit worthiness to people that I'm going to interact with and might need to depend on to get me through my degree progress. This might prime things in them that is going to compromise what kind of support I get. Even online who she is matters. She did however end up using a picture because she said shit my name is Keisha. I think it was going to signal something to somebody somewhere. And then you have Jay who says something look I wouldn't say what we say here in the support group in those other open or university groups and platforms. She said they don't know. She said the people in the group know the struggle. And things like the struggle and the hustle come up a lot in the students that I talk to. What they're talking about I think in that is a shared social location. That I trust information I don't have a lot of trust networks in this online space. I get that people think that my choice of college is really odd. So I don't trust talking to y'all about it either. You already think that I'm kind of stupid for being here. They say this to me they know. They get that there's this perception that their education is somehow inferior. So they're not going to seek out any tacit or explicit information from those networks. But they do still need to trust where that information is coming from. And they're going to trust people who are similar to themselves. So I think this actually complicates several of the assumptions that we make. I think we assume that we talk about online spaces as being democratizing we think anonymity is a net positive. For my students it isn't necessarily. It's a complicated negotiation with anonymity. They think that it might matter to gatekeepers, to teachers and administrators and fellow students. But also there's no way for them to find each other in the struggle if they don't know who each other are. They can't find their people if they don't know who their people are. And we generally do that by how they look and how they reveal information about themselves. I think it also gets to this idea of how the context of how people are participating in, again, these emerging higher education models effectively shuts them out of these other social processes that could remediate inequality. So I had the question back here about how much they're borrowing. And this is very important. Again, a lot of this comes out. A lot of these relationships and these finer points come out when they're talking about debt and their concerns about it. But there's something I'd like to point out. If I'm at profit U getting my PhD online, I'm probably never going to get the Ford or NIH grant or institutional aid. They aren't really barred from participating. But the prestige hierarchy of institutions makes it very unlikely that they are going to get the type of money that would help subsidize how much they have to borrow to pay for it. This is why institutional context matters and why who chooses to be where matters. So we can talk about the poor choices that people make. We can even talk about the predatory options available to them. But there are these interlocking systems of how we don't have to affirmatively exclude people to exacerbate the issues that create the inequality. If we're concerned about student loan debt, we might also want to be concerned about the fact that you have to go to a prestigious not-for-profit college to get the free or cheap money. I mean, that's one way we can intervene. I think there are reasons why we don't, but that's fine. Alright? And then some takeaways about methods and ethics and future directions. I've been a lot of talk about methods and ethics lately in the media, so I just wanted to touch on that. I think that social media content can be used as event history diaries. That's effectively how I use them in this project and how I'm using them in others. And I also think that university content, what they are producing in their online platforms should be viewed as institutional ethnographies. Things like, again, reading those SEC filings at creative nonfiction about how they create this idea of who and what they are. And more importantly, how those two rub up against each other and are in conflict with each other. That's where I get most of this information from students when I say, alright, let's look at your Facebook timeline over a while and let's pull out a few of these conversations and talk about them. Right? So at first they might tell me, no, I've never had any problems with my teachers. I like everybody here and they're really supportive, right? We prime the memory a little bit and then we also juxtapose that with what the institution says they're providing you, right? And when you start to put these things together, I think you get a much richer story of what's happening in these models that reveals, again, the way inequality gets perpetuated. Multiple permissions at every stage of this process is critical. So I not only ask for permissions from group moderators, which tends to be some, unfortunately, where a lot of us stop, but you need to ask the other members of the group. I'm very open about the fact that I'm there. I've been a member of the group for some time and I probably wouldn't do this any other way. I think it's important for us to share our research findings with the groups. I think that for us to better understand how inequality is happening and sort of these technocratic futures that are being imagined for us, we've got to do more comparative case studies and longitudinal studies and we've got to do more qualitative work. I think there's a lot of potential here for quantitative narrative analysis methods as well. If you've got this huge amount of data and we're looking not just for task but for meaning, I think this is one way for us to get at some of that resource and all that stuff when crap is online. And I'm happy to take questions, comments, discussion. Thank you very much. Several years ago, a colleague of mine was privy to a final examination that was being proctored at a major public university. And at the end of the final exam they asked that particular student to show his or her ID and they found that over 40% was not the person that was taking the final examination. Do you see any methodological issues with looking at online education when you really don't know if that's exactly the person that's taking that course? Yeah, so we talked about this with the MOOCs in the online learning session and have talked about and read about that a lot with other researchers. Yes, I mean, so one of the things, so one of the things I think we need to make in the research is one that there's an extreme amount of self-selection that we cannot say that anything that we get from those findings can be generalized to any larger student population for that reason and for the reason that we don't know that it's representative at all. And so I have a lot of questions about it using it in that way. And unfortunately I think we are using it in that way without interrogating sort of the methodological weaknesses of doing that kind of stuff. But I will say that I mean I want to be fair about again both the promise and the peril of using these methods right and for doing this type of research in online spaces. As you point out this is a problem both in person and online right. So the same way that we have had to try to develop mechanisms for doing it in real spaces and you're going to kill me for saying that. But you know what I mean in geographic spaces right, you have the same issues online. I don't think that it's specific to online spaces. It just probably has to be addressed specifically in that context. Some of this gets into when people opt into some of these models they're not really opting into a relationship with an institution which is how we normally would go about getting that kind of information right. They're opting into content, they're not forming a student relationship, they're not being admitted to an institution, they're not filling out anything right. So that becomes part of the problem which again gets at the issue increasingly of how we're collecting data. So in many cases what we're talking about when we talk about the people who are for instance taking MOOCs or doing online programs at for profit colleges is not the same type of institutional record keeping that we would have that we could match student records to student data in on campus settings and we need to be aware of that. And I think it greatly limits the type of work we've been able to do with students in those fields. I have to go through a for profit proprietary company to get access to students and overwhelmingly cannot get it right. So I have to go about all kinds of other recruiting means to get at those students. I can't go to the institutional review board at the University of Phoenix and ask for permission to survey their students right. And this becomes increasingly important seriously that these are the majority of students in higher education. What kind of access do we have to even find out these types of things? But even in terms of so-called race, that person listed here, she's African American Latino and is a Euro-American taking the course. I guess it has a further problematic aspect. Yeah, no. So there's always a degree of self-reporting bias when it comes to trying to measure race which is why I subscribe to the idea that we shouldn't measure race as a single variable. So one of the things I actually I think point out here so do I have, yeah so this is what the composite renderings about group identities comes from. So I ask the students to self-report things like race and gender. But then I also do a qualitative narrative analysis with them. So I'm not just interested in how you self-identify but how is it that you think people identify you. So I ask them questions like that and I think you do get at a much different concept of race when you do that. Race is a social location rather than this biological essentialist notion of race. And since we're interested in a social inequality I'm not interested in proving that there's something inherently inferior with groups of people but instead their experience of the social world. I think this is one way to get at that. So yeah, to combine those methods to try to get at a sort of richer idea of race. Hi, I'm Jessica. I'm from Microsoft Research. Hi, Jessica. Hey. Thanks for that awesome talk. It was great. I just had a really quick question. Do students in your work do they enjoy school? Is there any sense of pleasure in school? Because it gets really easy for us to sort of be like disparaging of it but I'm genuinely curious. No, thank you actually for the opportunity to say that. So I actually say that often. I do think it is important to know that the majority of the students I talk to are very proud of themselves and their education. By and large they think that the problem is you, not them, right? And they have a point to some extent. I mean, you know, we are all part of the problem. They're right. They're like, look, I did, I made choices that were available to me. I succeeded individually. I worked hard and they're mostly measuring that by the amount of effort and which is fair to do, right? I think all students think that's an important part of the developmental process. So no, by and large they are happy. If not overwhelmingly happy with their institution, certainly happy with themselves. Yeah, thank you for that. Hi, I'm Andromeda. I teach librarians to code sometimes online and the fact that most people are not roaming at autodidact has become a painfully salient change. I love that term and I'm going to have to read more about that. And the place making concepts as well because teaching people to code is much more affective than people give it credit for. So I'm wondering if you've seen people do particularly successful things to address place making to reach out to people who are not modeled as autodidacts. Yes, so not so much at an institutional level. I think that people are kind of hacking away at solutions. You've got, I think you've got individuals and sort of these collectives of people who are finding ways to do that, right? So you've got people who are using the technology but instead of being worried about it being massive are trying to do it on a smaller scale, right? Or either confining that to region or to place or to group. And I think that students do better in those spaces at least as it relates to again building social networks and the sort of sharing of tasks and explicit information and emotional support through the process, right? So yeah, I think a hybrid model tends to work best but I mean if we're again talking about the who is that available to I mean if what we're trying to do is we're trying to do an efficient use of time because I cannot physically travel to a place, right? We run into the same issues but I think that there is merit to things like again they find if students are finding each other based on shared similarities and their experiences of education maybe we should follow them in that process. I mean that's obviously what students are interested in doing. We can develop institutional mechanisms to facilitate that. It would involve things like not getting rid of the comment section in online courses. It would involve things like helping students identify and find each other in building safe spaces online for them to do so, right? And incentivizing those things. So students are already doing it was kind of some of the point from my research. It's about whether or not we're going to develop mechanisms for them to do it. So thank you for your talk. And my question earlier you made the comment that you see people opting into content versus an institution and I think you were specifically talking about MOOCs but can you just tease apart the difference you see between opting into the for-profit institutions. I think this kind of links to what Jess was saying and where you see these online groups these online spaces developing a connection to the institutions or these participants kind of parlaying that for a sense of institutional connection. Can you just talk a little bit about that? So I think the question there is how are the students cobbling together something that they're not getting from the institution, right? And what that speaks and what it then says about how they feel, the extent to which they feel embedded in any institution. So yes, students do lose some sense of identification and this matters a lot to the students that I tend to talk to, right? So when you are resisting sort of this idea of yourself as not being a college student or not participating sort of in the academic realm the identity of student is actually quite important and that's generally conferred by an institution and the students really desire that and want that. So they mention things like getting their student ID card, right? Or all of these symbols of belonging to an institution that become fewer when you are doing that online, right? So they have fewer of those symbols which is why I think they seek out ways where they can then enact that in other spaces. So you do see lots of visible signaling like almost all of the students in this online group have some reference to their degree process in their username. It's, you know, future PhD so on and so on and so, or Bella, which I know I'm talking about, you can find me at TrustyMCPHD on Twitter. Which I love by the way and point that out to them all the time but you do see a lot of that visible signaling happening which I think is part of that of trying to say I belong to an institution and trying to develop a sense of embedded is that they're not going to get from the institution because of the way it's structured and so they're defining it for themselves. I think that's what the participation in the group is even about. Again the group is narrowly, you could say that it was about being a group for women in college, right? But instead it's women pursuing a PhD, right? And that is very important to them saying, no, I'm in a group for women who are getting a PhD. It's another way to signal that and to sort of build those institutional identifications. Yeah. Hi, Bruce here. Hi Bruce. This has been fantastic. Thank you. I'm curious how much of this is generational? I think of how students today versus 20 years ago, 20 years ago approach learning, approach being able to find groups in online spaces versus needing a physical location. How much is this in flux and they're going to stay in flux? That's a really good question and a hard one to answer and I'll tell you why I think it's hard and then we'll do some totally unscientific speculation, right? Excellent. That's exactly what we're going for, right? I'm going to get my sociologist card revoked. We don't speculate. The first thing is generations are hard to understand in this context. What are we going to call that? How are we going to anchor the concept of generations and then I think that gets in the idea that generationally people are sharing the same cultural milieu and I'm not sure that they are. I'm not. I think we could take that for granted when the majority of students were coming from very similar class and socioeconomic backgrounds that I don't think we can take for granted anymore. For instance, my 1970s will be quite different from somebody else's, the same generational position. I think that what is more salient probably are those intersections with generation with all of the other stuff, race, class, gender, and where you're coming from. It gets really hard to think of it that way. I will say that most of the students that I speak to tend to be in their 30s and 40s. I have some that skew a little older and younger. Usually that's determined by parental status. They're younger if they have children and then I have a few older students. I'm not sure that they're identifying I'm not sure they're choosing online spaces or have a different understanding of group formation processes online because of generation. I think they are doing it because of how their choices in other spaces are constrained. I know some younger students who have much easier to form communities and groups online than an older generation which is just not as facile with the internet and online communities. So again, I'm not, that just doesn't come out as much in the students that I talk to. I will see younger students who are taking courses online who have a high amount of institutional distrust. Right, so for instance I have one young lady who is not yet, she's not in her 30. She has two young children participant I'm thinking about who did not want to talk to someone that she met in her online class. They do meet once a year for like two days. They call it the residency period. They come to this hotel and they meet each other and someone there liked her and wanted to keep in contact with her afterwards and she was like no, he's weird people online. Like there was not at all she was not into it at all actually and then I asked some of the members in the online group if they had met offline in any, if these relationships had extended in a way and they all thought that was a huge violate. Like what? No. Like they would share this information in space but a phone call would have been very weird. So again, I'm not sure that's what's happening. You're a... So Swag, you said they mostly come from two institutions. Yes. So part of the problem is how do you find this group? So I'm curious about is the group growing and you've mostly talked about the groups supporting one another and sort of supporting themselves through individual problems. Do they end up collectivizing to advocacy or anything like that or how do they use the group? No, by and large no. And this is actually a really great question. I have said for a very long time that it's an interesting case study to be had for anyone who does work on campus student movements and whether or not students can form them anymore when they are in a market sector college. Anyway, so if anybody wants that idea somebody really has to write this thing and it can't be me is what I'm being told. So no, actually, and I think it's actually quite interesting that you don't see, you see collective identity building around the degree not the institution. I think that's number one. We're PhD students but we're not students at ProfitU. That's the anchor for the identity. And then the second thing though, again, so to the broader context of can students form any kind of collectivities in these spaces and we don't have evidence that they can. I actually have evidence to the contrary that some student contracts with for private schools and their enrollment agreements would not allow collective organizing of any kind. And then even if they wanted to, where would they do it becomes another issue, right? And then again, keeping in mind social location we're already stretching beyond sort of all of my other competing social roles for me to do this. I'm also now supposed to become normal Ray, right? So I mean if you had issues about time and space and vulnerabilities before, right, like this is not going to make that much better. So no, actually, you don't see a lot of it. Hi, my name is Hong. I come from China, Beijing Normal University. I'm a master student and I can well remember that my supervisor once told me information does not equals to knowledge. And knowledge does not equals to wisdom. So it is a perspective from Chinese people and I'm really interested. It's so noted in science. So I'm really interested in your perspective of that, the relationship between information and education. And there is a theory called knowledge sociology which is from Manhattan, right? But now in today's society as you have mentioned before, everyone has the access to make the contribution to the knowledge, but who should become responsible to act as the dog keeper, you know, that from the long history of thousand years and all the knowledge we have learned today has been, has the background of some maybe political or economic reasons. That's right. So and what do you think about this? One, I would agree with the Chinese people. That's number one. Number two, I think the prevailing belief is that somehow there was wisdom in the crowd, right? And so I think I over-reliant to sort of crowd sourcing of information will somehow take care of that archival filtration process for us, which is kind of like the democratizing veneer of inequality, right? It sounds good, but something rankles there for you a little bit, right? And I think that what rankles is the idea that I'm not sure that the crowd will do that type of critical interrogation of those types, those very types of things, right? That everything that we sort of drag with us in our intellectual histories has more economic and historical context. And I think that we're probably better at crowd sourcing information than we are critical analysis. That's just to be the personal being political there. Yes. Hi, so you had mentioned that you had mentioned that you had had a hard time just getting access to students and I would sort of think that that would be endemic to the atmosphere. And I'm just, you know, Bruce had mentioned that you may sort of see an intergenerational thing. I'm wondering if you look to other spaces like maybe there's a World of Warcraft plan or whatever for kids who are in at Phoenix University or something like that. I'm just wondering, I would think that most everything is going to be designed away from getting these people to congregate. Do you think that there's any sort of hope for providing atmospheres for them to congregate and perhaps pursuing legislation such that, you know, the design of a website is very influential to the kinds of interactions people have with it and increasingly not just through education, but through our government or interaction with government agencies. It's all just go to this website. You are completely constrained by these forms. Right. How do you think that that can be worked out? Yeah. So the first thing is I would love for there to be some critical analysis and interrogation of platforms. I'm right there with you, right? So one for us to question this, the ideology that just putting things online somehow makes it available. That's one. But then I think there's the, yeah, the practical methodological process of us saying that there's lots built into platforms. And so one of the things I've thought a lot about with this project is summer. And again, especially as it's not just about, yeah, it's not just about self-selecting and the social interactions increasingly for you to participate fully in sort of the civic realm you've got to have. It's assumed that you'll have access to these things. And I think that's not an accurate assumption. So the first part of your question about where people are meeting in spaces. So yeah, I actually have a lot of success with, there was a point at which where I had to say, okay, if I cannot go to the for private college and like sit in the student lounge and recruit students, where else might people be who are also students, right? And it really just became about institutions seeking what institutions are left. And so it became things like I go to lots of church groups have been particularly fruitful, right? So the church remains. And I go to places I go to things like sporting kind of events and people on sports teams, that kind of thing. And then it's just really, there's a lot of diffusion through social network. So generally when I meet a student who's enrolled in for private college, she knows three or four more at work. Two more in her church group, one more in her neighborhood kind of thing. And so people, yeah, they're intersecting with these other institutions, but there's an extent to which these institutions increasingly are not stable places for that type of gathering for people. And again, this produces a very particular problem, especially I think for sociologists who have always there is an assumption about place and almost all of our and the way that we measure almost everything, we assume people are in the same place. And I think that digital spaces are really going to push us to reconsider that theoretically. And that we cannot take that for granted anymore. That's one of the major takeaways from my work. And that you have to find the students where they are. And that does take a lot of sort of work on other institutional spaces. Yeah, and now what we can do about that? Yeah, we've, I mean, look, so technology, if it's smart is always out ahead of policy, right? That's kind of I think the point. And so it does take us a while to catch up with how are we using these things? What are the effects of us using them in these ways? And then to catch up with anything that resembles legislation or policy. I mean, look, there's a double movement action that happens in sort of social change. And I think hopefully we're getting close to the extreme of one and we'll start to figure out ways to push back. I mean, that's the historical pattern anyway. I'm not sure what it would look like. Hi, my name's Bobby and I'm a big, I work here at Harvard. I'm a big fan of yours and I hope I don't lose my cred by asking this question. Sure, thank you. I wanted to circle back to something you said at the very beginning. And the question I don't, didn't feel like you answered about enjoying studying. There's a lot of stuff I've been through in my life. I'm really proud of having survived it, but I did not enjoy the experience at the time. I'm also old enough to have seen the whole credentialing movement come in. Many of my colleagues would go and get higher and higher degrees in the hopes of expanding, but the intersectionality of their lives was such they weren't going to get anywhere anyway. So I'm wondering, and this may be outside your research clearly, but outside whatever, is there a way for us to separate some of this credentialing out from or the whole concept of credentialing out from the idea of getting an education to the extent of going for a master's, going for a PhD? Like how do we disrupt the cycle? Exactly. Right, right. External shock. No, so I've actually thought of it. It is outside of the realm of my media projects. You're right. But I've thought about it a lot, because these are the ends of the theorizing. The very first time you start to realize that this race is sort of happening. You go, that can't go on indefinitely. There is a point where a terminal degree really is a terminal degree. As more people sort of reach that ceiling, what does that mean? I really do think that the process at this point is just erupted. It's going to have to be external to the process of credentialing. One of the things that I think that could be, again, if the institutions understand that they're in competition with jobs, we should understand that they're in competition with jobs. So I think that probably one version of an external shock would be to improve the labor markets. If people have, the one way to change the constraints on your educational choices is to not make it your only choice. And then I can get real radical with you about basic income and all that kind of stuff, but they might kick me out of here. Yeah, but if you're with me, then yes, I get on that train. I really do. I think that fundamentally educational policy is economic policy. To the extent that we focus on one and not the other, it is because we know that education won't push back. It is the easier thing for us to tweak, but that doesn't mean that it is the most effective. So I think at some point you have to get to the work the other side of the equal side. I packed the audience. Thanks for a fantastic talk. I wonder, can you situate into it, maybe it's a historical story, how community college is connected to this conversation. So do these institutions become places that are meeting needs that were previously unfulfilled, or have things changed in the community college? Seeing that. Yes, so we actually have the most literature there, and because community colleges view themselves as sort of juxtaposed against these models earlier, sooner than did four-year colleges, right? And so actually we've got most of the research in this area tends to go back the furthest there. So a few things happen. There's the critique of community colleges and sort of mission creek, but I want to be very fair here about what mission creek was. And that is because community colleges were themselves a democratizing ideology at one point, right? They were the place where everybody could go. Whether that was to complete a degree or to take a couple classes, as someone told me in San Francisco Community College once, he was like, look, that's where you went until you figured stuff out. It was only going to cost you a couple hundred bucks. And so you might as well take a class, right? And it was a place to go. Again, place became really important. Community colleges served as one of these spaces, right? But then a couple of things happened. First, we just cannot underestimate the effect of declining public financial support for community colleges. At the same time that we expected them to redress just about every inequality we were producing everywhere else. So all of a sudden you've got all of these inequalities that are coming out of K-12 from tracking within school and between school segregation and all of these things. And where were you supposed to go to get remedial course work? Everybody would tell you to go to the local community college. Well, as it turns out remediation is expensive and labor intensive because it does require people, right? And this is why we have found that online courses are not particularly good at 100 and 200 level courses where people's inequalities and their college preparation are most evident, right? Because that is labor intensive. In fact, you find for-profit colleges like Strayer, I think last year, they stopped online remediation courses in math for some of the students and said, no, now you're going to have to take it, if you want to get into this one, you're going to have to take it on campus, right? Because their internal research set is not a good model. It's not a good fit for remediating that. As an institution, that's entirely what community colleges are pretty much set up to do. So if you charge them with doing that, ramp up the amount of inequality that we're producing in those places and then reduce the amount of financial support that we provide to them. What you've got are community colleges that are competing on 50 different fronts, trying to remain politically and economically viable. That's what created Mission Creep. And so they're trying to serve the political interests. Yeah, we're incubated for entrepreneurship this year because the governor really likes that. This year we're going to offer ballroom dancing because the legislature really likes that and their fortunes are so greatly tied to their political relationships and the political whims of their states that the Mission Creep is just about them trying to manage that process. So yes, so that was the one thing and constrained the amount to which they could respond to that demand. And then the other thing was people no longer could take time out of the job market to do it, right? The nature of the job market changed, right? You have to constantly be either in a job or looking for a job with this amount of structural job change and that is not conducive to going to a place every Tuesday from two to four. I know that's not very upbeat. I don't know. I need to end these things with pictures of puppies. And I never remember to bring the pictures of puppies. I'm very sorry about that. The hopeful note is again we've been through worse and again I just I do think there has to be a resistance. And I'm very hopeful about the fact that we're close to that point. That is my hopeful note. Anyone else? Are we going to see Mia? Yes. That's a quick question. Who do you think of the different stakeholders? So policymakers, for-profit schools, students themselves really needs to see your research and really needs to understand it. Oh, wow. Mine? I wish I could get a few minutes alone. Oh, with the Senate subcommittee I think I think the Senate, the subcommittee to help committee particularly as they're now getting ready to undergo a leadership change. I think they didn't really lose their chair. I'm not sure who's going to take that over. And they've been very instrumental in kind of keeping this conversation sort of in the public awareness and I wish that we could broaden that conversation to talk about things like connecting education policy to jobs policy and that kind of thing. And I think that might be the mechanism to do it. So maybe that and I would love to- I do this a lot anyway. I go to lots of church groups and the like. Again the few places where people gather anymore, I wish we could be there more often having these kinds of conversations. At the city level I'm not aware of so much. There's this hope I think amongst policymakers right now that the real action is at the state level because the federal level is just... Yeah, it's got a few issues is what I'll say. And so there's hope that states can make more movements. I think the states that have been most innovative the not so good news is that those are the states that have less inequality to deal with. If you can play around with innovation when your rate of inequality is a little lower, which is why I always think it probably takes a broader sort of jobs program or solution. But I think that the stuff that they're Connecticut but that doesn't necessarily- it's not representative of again inequality across the nation. I have liked some of the things that were coming out of the CUNY system in New York for instance. They at least acknowledge the fact that students are making choices amongst for profit schools and their own and have tried to put things in place to help counsel them should they want to transfer and have been willing to take their credits and the like that other systems have not been willing to do and that broadens the choices available to those students. So yeah, there's some piecemeal things. Anyone else? If not, thank you so very much for coming out. Thank you.