 First of all, a couple of quick announcements. I just want to let everyone in the room know that we are live streaming this event. So you can find it on our website at epi.org slash events. After the event, the video will be posted so you can watch it again and again and share it with your friends. I also wanted to let you know that we are live tweeting this event and you can join us, those of you who do such things with the hashtag lower ed. So hashtag lower ed and our Twitter handle is at economic policy. Let's see. A couple of other quick announcements. Tressie will be signing books after. So for those of you here in the room, just queue up. There's a table right outside. If you bought a book, she will sign it. So thank you very much in advance for doing that. One other quick ad. The economic policy institute has another great event coming up on March 15th. EPI's Richard Rothstein and Layla Morsey, his co-author and Glenn Lowry of Brown University and a scholar, Ames Goert of the Brennan Center and Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post will be here on March 15th to discuss the effects of incarceration on the children of people who are incarcerated, the effects both on the system and on the children. So it should be a really interesting discussion and you can find out more about that also on our website at EPI.org. Did you say for the live streaming if people are tweeting EPI.org backslash events? Yes. Okay. Yeah. And I am honored to introduce Janelle Jones. Janelle will take it from here and introduce our esteemed speakers today. Janelle Jones is an economic analyst working on labor market topics within EPI's program on race, ethnicity, and the economy. And Janelle also conducts economic research for the Economic Analysis and Research Network known as ERN, which is a network of EPI's state partners. Janelle's recent work, which you can also find on our website, includes an article about how destructive social policy has created and maintained the racial wealth gap, leaving African Americans with less opportunity to build wealth. She also wrote recently about how white families are twice as likely to receive an inheritance as black families. We are honored to have all three of you here to discuss this important topic. Janelle Jones, take it away. Thanks, Liz. You can hear me. Okay. Thanks, everyone, for coming. We are so excited to host this amazing and for sale book out here. Just one more plug. It's for sale. Lower the troubling rise of for profits in the new economy. And joining us today to talk about this is Cary Wolford. Cary is the president of Veterans Education Success, which was created to protect and defend the integrity and promise of GI Bill and other federal education programs for veterans and service members. And prior to founding Veteran Education for Success, she was senior counsel in the Senate and a policy aide at the Clinton White House. Tracy, Dr. Tracy McMillan Cotton, is an assistant professor of sociology at VCU and faculty associate with Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She's published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Descent, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. And while we're here to talk about lower ed, I definitely want to plug all of the other work that Tracy does on digital sociology, on inequality more broadly, particularly on race. So definitely check that out. And if you're not following her on Twitter, you should be following her on Twitter. You should do that immediately. So that's all I'm going to say because I think we're going to have a really good discussion. So we'll kick it off with Tracy. Okay. So first of all, thank you for coming out. Today is Wednesday. Yes. All right. So Wednesday, instead of eating lunch, you came here. And I really do appreciate that. I do not take that kind of stuff lightly. I don't leave my house for anything. So I think it's a really big deal when people do to come out to see me. I'd like to thank everybody here at EPI, of course, for hosting me. I cannot thank Janelle enough for her work. So let me reiterate how important and critical her work has been to maintaining this ongoing conversation that we are having about the significance of wealth, to the persistence of racial inequality, both in the labor market and in life outcomes and mobility. I cite her in the book. And in fact, I think your work on African American young adult workers post-recession, the rates of underemployment, I think I teach it just about every semester. So I'd like to thank you for your work. And then I also tell them that you're young and adorable. I go, see, you can do this, too. I show your picture. It is. It's a whole thing I do in my graduate seminar. It's very important. It's important to the professionalization. And thank you, Carrie, for the very important work that you do for veterans. Of course, a significant part of the conversation that I'm having is about vulnerable groups. And we typically think of veterans as being a part of that, especially given their centrality to how the GI Bill has really been significant to the arguments we make about whether or not we should allow for-profit colleges to have access to federal student aid. The expansion of the GI Bill was actually part of that conversation. Many moons ago, the case that many for-profit colleges made is that by not allowing them full access to federal student aid programs, we were constraining opportunity for veterans. We were not allowing them to shop the entire higher education market. And one of the things that I hope that we can do as part of the post-discussion of this book is to maybe revisit that conversation. I think it's less true today than it was 30 years ago. And one of the things that we have found about the success rate of veterans in the for-profit college sector are things that I think should cause us to ask questions more broadly about who has access to them and who does not. And so that's me. I'm not sure what we'd like to start with, except maybe a conversation broadly about what I hope the main argument is in the book. And then I'll turn it over to you guys and try to move to Q&A as quickly as possible. That tends to be really what people are here for to question me because, yeah, to question me. That's just fine. I do want to say hi to all of the faces I'm recognizing from your avis on Twitter. I see you and I say hi. Thank you. That's why, so if I keep going, you're like, you didn't know me, no, but I say recognize your face. So hi. Make sure you please say hello after. So this book comes out of two sets of experiences. The first being what I call PGS or pre-graduate school. My life is sort of split into these two, these two lifetimes, right? I had sort of a full life before I went back to graduate school. In that respect, I was non-traditional. I had worked and I'd done all the stuff that young adults do. And then I went back to graduate school and as it turned out, my experiences, PGS, ended up influencing the questions that I asked in graduate school as I was becoming a sociologist. And so those experiences broadly before that was that I had worked in two different for-profit colleges. I did not know them as such and that's actually I think kind of part of the story. In that respect, I was not unlike millions of other people. It seemed strange when you do policy or you do higher education or maybe even sociology, although we're not as good about that as policy people. But the designation for-profit college has taken on such a significant discursive meaning to us that we think that is true for everyone else. It is not true for everyone else. In fact, when you say for-profit college to most people, they think you mean private school. If they have some awareness of sort of the higher education ecosystem, they think you mean online schools, right? And those of us in the room probably know that an online school can be for-profit, but you do not need to be online to be for-profit. And in fact, in the last 20, 25 years, as traditional higher education has increasingly moved online, it's not even true anymore or probably useful to conflate an online school with being a for-profit school, right? Most students who attend a for-profit school do still attend at least part of their time of their matriculation they attend on campus. So the two really don't have as much of a significant overlap as they once did in the early 1990s. So the designation did not mean much to me. I knew about the for-profit colleges that I worked in, what most of our likely students knew, which is that it was a school. And yeah, it was different than the school I had attended. I had attended a traditional not-for-profit college in undergrad, the historically black college in North Carolina Central University, which is the good school there in Durham, North Carolina. And there are others, but it is the good institution. And so, yeah, I had attended that one. Sorry, Janelle. And so I knew it was different from that. But different in that people didn't live there. Not different in that it's organizational structure or it's corporate structure was different. And certainly not that those differences should mean anything for the type or quality or extent of the education that people got at one school as opposed to another. These designations are not significant to millions of people. That's sort of my takeaway. That is just as true for the people who are working in them as it is true for the prospective students who come in the doors. So at both schools, I call the first the beauty college and the other, the technical college in the book. I did marketing, admissions and enrollment. And in doing so, got to meet what I would understand later was sort of what I call the two sub-sectors of the likely for-profit college student. The beauty college really represents sort of an older period, still the majority of for-profit colleges, but certainly not the types of schools that we think about now when we think about for-profit colleges. So these are the technical colleges where you go to become a cosmetologist, an auto mechanic where I was from in Charlotte, North Carolina. We were famous for having one of the only schools that trained you to be a NASCAR technician, for example, right? They have very narrow, very specific sort of occupational training, generally in occupations that are regulated to some extent, have some sort of regulation to participate in it, right? That's one part of the sector. In that sector, that is overwhelmingly female, 75% of the students in certificate granting institutions or lower are women. They are disproportionately African American. In many respects, when we talk about for-profit colleges, we are talking about a gendered problem. And one of my things I hope to do with this book was to shift the conversation for us to understand it that way. We have talked a lot about for-profit colleges over the last 10 years, but not about the impact I think that is having on women, especially women of color. At the technical college where I went, I was recruited to one and then recruited away to the other. At the technical college, it was quite different. Everything about how our organizational system worked was different and I would come to understand later that was about how the organization was set up. So unlike the beauty college, the technical college was a publicly traded shareholder organization, right? It was a national for-profit college. Those students were more likely to be male than my students at the beauty college. They were more likely to be working as opposed, as compared to being unemployed. They were more likely to be white. Quite frankly, I think I maybe saw two white people the whole time I was at the beauty college. We saw significantly more at the technical college. But while we had these differences and the technical college offered a different set of degrees. Bachelors degrees, associates, bachelors and masters degrees in fields like criminal justice, technology and broadly what we call business, lots gets conflated under that business header, by the way. So in the book, I say these represent the sort of poles of the for-profit college universe, right? You've got this large population of students. Right now we're still I think at about two million. You ever take a few because we have a few schools closed. It changes a bit. But I think the most recent number is still two million at an all time high. I think it was two and a half million of those registered in for-profit colleges. And they are enrolled in for-profit schools that do have these sort of distinct differences. Those that are more likely to be in sort of the certificate universe or those that were similar to the beauty college as opposed to those that are like the shareholder organizations or the technical schools. And the way we had treated that as researchers and as policy people is that those were all the same, right? But we had no reasons to think of them the same. The student populations, the composition of them were remarkably different. Again, we don't tend to think of middle class white men pursuing a master's degree in business as being similar to poor black women in a cosmetology school in any other universe. Except when we talk about for-profit colleges. It made no sense that we thought about these entities as being the same and as about their decision making being the same. So one of the things that was sort of animating my question was how are these student groups that are so remarkably different by just about every other measure that we make meaningful policy and sociological conclusions based on race, class, and gender making these same decisions. How is it that we have middle class people who are taking out $130,000 to get a PhD from for-profit Capella making the same decisions as a poor Hispanic woman in a medical technology college in La Jolla, California? How are we gonna understand that? It didn't make sense to say that there was something about the student, right? It had been far too easy when we thought of these students as being just uniformly poor and minority to say that they just didn't know better. They were quote unquote low information consumers or to say they were prey to the for-profit college predator, right? And while that gives us some useful understanding it really doesn't answer for me what were some of the more interesting questions. They couldn't all be low information. Again, if you have a traditional college background you know something about how college works and yet they were attending for-profit colleges just like poor students who had no exposure to higher education. So for me that answer was more about what had happened to these groups and about who they were. And so this is the new economy piece of my argument and what I argue has happened. As workers across race, class and gender have felt more insecure in the labor market, right? They are looking for insurance and they're looking for insurance against a couple of things. Unemployment, underemployment and income spikiness, right? How sensitive they are to those changes or about how much wealth and income and status they come to it with. So poor black women are more vulnerable, right? But middle class white men aren't invulnerable if we haven't learned anything the last few weeks. We have hopefully learned this. They are not impervious to those changes, right? So the decisions they were able to make about higher education were shaped about, were shaped based on who they were but that wasn't the only thing that was shaping their decisions. What was shaping their decisions is that they needed a credential which they mostly saw as social insurance against the new sort of way we work in the economy to try to compete for what is for many people a dwindling set of good jobs. And good to find is more than an income position. What people were looking for was status, mobility and security, status, mobility and security. A good job isn't just one that pays well. If that were the case, we would encourage all of our best and brightest to become plumbers. If you have ever needed a plumber, when you need them, the plumber is the most important profession you have ever engaged in your life. All of society breaks down when the plumbing breaks down but we are not encouraged so we pay a premium for a plumber. Again, if you have ever needed one, you will understand them. When you first need one, you'll remember this conversation. Plumbers are extremely important and we pay them accordingly but we don't think about them as a high status profession. So for that reason, people are responding to the same thing all of us are responding to, not just income security, all of that was a significant part of it but the students that I spoke to wanted the status that comes along with a good professional white collar job. They also wanted protection from changes, rapid changes in on demand work. This was especially true for the women who were relying on jobs in the service economy. They wanted out of on demand scheduling. A lot of the service economy now requires you to be on call for hours at a time, making childcare and managing your other social roles virtually impossible. For women, again, this is especially a gendered phenomenon, this is especially a problem. Women are responsible for the children. They are responsible for the childcare, on demand work that may pay the same or even pay a little more than the cosmetology job, the administration job, the medical technicians job is still not as good a job, right? Because you can't get, you don't know when you have to go to work and when you'll be getting off. So you couldn't plan your childcare accordingly. These were the types of things that people were using to determine the quality of their job. And what for-profit colleges had designed was a very efficient mechanism for enrolling students across these traditional divides of race, class and gender who wanted quality jobs. They were selling insurance, right? They're selling a form of social insurance. So my question became is why was a social insurance so valuable all of a sudden, right? We've always wanted good jobs that pay well and give you status. But suddenly people felt like there weren't gonna be enough of those to go around, right? So what had happened there? Well, what happened there is that people also felt the realities of other parts of the social safety net frame, right? The difficulties in getting affordable childcare, right? The responsibility for your healthcare when it was attached to your job. So having a job that offered healthcare, especially when you had a preexisting condition or someone on your insurance did, right? Having a stable job meant having stable access to healthcare, right? So job quality got wrapped up in the things that the other parts of the social safety net were not providing for workers. And because of that, the insecurity that they were presenting with when they walked into the admissions process at a for-profit college was, I'm scared, right? I'm vulnerable. And the only thing people have told me is a defense against that vulnerability is to be better trained and better educated. For just about every other option out there, I'm gonna have to take time out of the labor market, right? Or figure out where to keep my children all day and all night. And for-profit colleges have said to a significant part of the population, no, we can get you a credential here, right? Without you having to take out that opportunity cost, right? And we can give you some insurance against those changes in the labor market. And that's what I found was true for middle-class men. It's true as it was for poor women. And I suspect if the economists are right, and I think they are about one out of every three times, if the economists are right, these are all conditions that are expected to continue if not accelerate. So the final question for me is what kind of intervention were we gonna have that did not rely on the student aid system and did not make for-profit colleges such a rational solution to a problem that millions of new Americans are gonna be facing? So that's what I hope the book is. Well, I think that EPI is really the perfect place to host this discussion because when several of us in the audience were working at the Labor Department for Bob Raish in the 90s and several people at EPI now were there then too, we spent a lot of time worrying about what we're then the beginnings of massive changes in the labor market. And Tressie's book I think is really interesting because there are many of us here in the room who today work on the problem of for-profit college abuses of students. But we often approach it from the point of view of deregulation in the higher education market from Wall Street Takeover. And while we understand and certainly notice labor market changes, we don't often ping it as closely to labor market challenges. And Tressie's book is really interesting because she ties it directly to that. And in case not all of you have read all of it, I'm just gonna share just a few parts that I think as I was reading them, I thought, ooh, Larry, Michelle, and Ross Eisenbray would love this. So Larry, tell me if you love it at the end. Thank you, thank you. So she talks a lot about shifting risk and that's something that a lot of people here are working on every day, which is that the new economy that the labor market today has shifted the risk and ended the social contract with workers, shifted the risk onto workers. So whereas before you could count on your employment, providing, stability, retirement funds, healthcare, all kinds of things, that and the social contract meant that both employers and society bore some of the risk of that. Now the entire risk is on people. So your jobs are transient, you have no benefits. And so she talks a lot about the shifting risk and saying the social contract is gone. And says, for example, the best way to understand the expansion of for-profit colleges is through inequalities, which constrain where a person can go to college and determine who bears the risk and how it pays off, as well as changes in work, which make college the only practical choice for getting a job. And she talks about how the more insecure that workers feel today in the labor market, the more they'll be willing to spend money on an insurance policy issue is just saying and buy a credential. And what I think is really, so I think that that's a really important perspective. But I also wanna congratulate her because the book came out yesterday. So this is a launching, which is really nice. Sure, yeah. Wherever books are sold. So I think that it's a really good perspective that we're not always paying close attention to, I think in our day-to-day fights about certain education policies. And a second way that I think her book is really helpful. Oh, and one thing about that is I worry about the future. So for example, recently, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking have been recently tweeting and talking publicly, including just a couple weeks ago in Dubai, about the future of employment. And they're very concerned that technology is going to eliminate, as Elon Musk says, 50% of American jobs by the year 2030. Now that may be a tighter timeframe than others subscribe to, but the idea is that technology and robots are gonna replace a lot of jobs. And so we're likely, now, whether it's 50% whether it's 2030, who knows. But there's certainly no question that technology is gonna replace a lot of jobs. And you can see then therefore that more people will be insecure in the future. So more of them will be seeking a credential. I think, I'd love to engage you in this question. When I was in the Senate on the Education Committee, we did the big investigation. We did two-year investigation into for-profit colleges. We did document requests from and got internal corporate emails. We uncovered the pain funnel, which you talk about in your book. And what we uncovered basically was in addition to a lot of stats about how students actually perform and how the for-profit colleges basically over-promise and under-deliver and leave people worse off than they found them with more student debt for no degree or a worthless degree. And in fact, so worthless that sometimes in our work today, helping veterans, there are people who were promised, get this degree and you can become a registered nurse. Get this degree and you can become a plumber. Get this degree and you can become an electrician. And then you graduate and you cannot because you are literally ineligible to even sit for the license museum, which is just so horrific. So, but what we focused on in the help committee was the predatory nature of the for-profit college recruiters and it's very interesting because you spent, the other interesting thing, by the way, about her book is that she spent a lot of time interviewing current students and she enrolled in nine schools and tried them out, which is just this great undercover perspective. When you're a poor and do not have a research grant, that is how you do social science research. So thank you, Carrie. So she, we saw the predatory nature. We saw students because we saw these corporate emails of like the vice president to the other vice president saying, go after those people and lie and cheat and steal and do whatever you have to do. Go set up outside a sectionate housing and promise them everything. Get them all signed up with veterans. Like it's a military gravy train. All you have to do is get the asses in classes and we get to keep the GI bill for the whole semester. They drop out on day two, we keep their money. Just like explicitly fraudulent and predatory, very aggressive and very deceptive. But you encounter students who I think were not necessarily tricked into going. Like you have this group of swagger which are, which these African American women getting PhDs who create a social group called swagger, swag. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the differences, the lack of predatory recruiting that you saw maybe or sort of, you talked about rational choice. I think maybe talk more about the choice. All right, so there are a couple of things. So the system of enrollment and the structure of for profit higher education can be predatory and still be positive for the experience. The, it's not about create a positive experience for the students. And I think that's the part that gets really complex for multiple publics to understand. It is absolutely predatory. Let's be clear about that. It didn't serve my argument very well for me to begin or end it there because then people don't listen to anything else. So there's a reason why I really don't lead or structure the book in that way. Because what was for me, first of all, that ground had very much been covered. What was more interesting is how had a predatory experience created for students, enough of a positive experience that they were certainly continuing their enrollment and what I found students doing, sacrificing a lot to continue in their enrollment. So at the bottom sort of tier of for profit college, for profit colleges again, where some of the poor students are, it sort of makes sense, right? There the low information construction might be more meaningful. Not knowing the differences, the prestige hierarchy of traditional higher education, not having anything to compare the for profit college experience to. It makes less sense for the right now, 300,000 or so students who are enrolled in a for profit college at the graduate level, right? And so for me, it was about looking at the two ends of that spectrum. Because that student is again, by definition, not low information. They have experiences to compare it to. And so yes, I found this group of women and actually I didn't find them. They found me. This is part of sort of what it means, I think when your social networks and ties tie you into that vast marketing system that the for profit college sector has. It was because I'm black and a woman on the Facebook. That is why the group found me, right? And so this thing starts popping up on my Facebook feed one day. And I go, oh, what is that? It was about African American women in PhD programs. So it was a support group. Well, I was black and a woman in a PhD program. That seems to fit. So I joined and it's immediately clear that no one there is in a traditional PhD program. Their questions at discourse was very different. And so over time I then went back and got permission and did some research there and did some recruiting of those students. And so yes, these were disproportionately African, not disproportionately overwhelmingly African American women, although there were some Hispanic identifying women and a handful of women who identified as white. But typical again of the overall race, class and gender patterns, these a lot of black women. And so when I would talk to them about why were you at Capella? So the big names in graduate education and for profits, University of Phoenix, Capella, Western Governors. And one more that I'm now forgetting. The Western Governors is not for profit. Yeah. It's not Strayer. Walden, thank you, Walden, right? So they're overwhelmingly enrolled in these at the time, right? And really just a handful of majors, clinical psychology, education, organizational psychology, and sort of broadly health science, health management sort of stuff, right? And so my questions for them were about why and what this experience was like. All of them had negative experiences, but the enrollment process was the least negative. They all remembered fondly the experience of being enrolled because on the other side of that, it feels like help. And that's, I think, something very important for us to keep in mind. What is predatory about the process really only becomes predatory if you know the reason that they are pursuing you. If you do not know that, it feels like help. It feels like the same sort of concierge college experience that the wealthy students in our country have, where someone calls them and their family up on the phone, invites them to parents weekend, answers when they call, responds to their emails. We don't think that's strange when Harvard does it, right? It's really only strange if you know Capella isn't Harvard. And for you to know that, you'd have to be a different kind of person. So they were having horrible experiences trying to finish their degrees, horrible. And by that point, I only talked to students who were currently enrolled, by the way, because by the time you talk to students who have completed or withdrawn, their retroactive understanding of their experience in for-profit colleges is impacted by their labor market entry or not entry. So I was really, I wanted to control for that. So all of my students were currently enrolled, it is. Isn't that a super important point? I would think that their labor market realities is one of the most important. But it doesn't, yeah, but it doesn't, no, it doesn't change, it only becomes real for you once you try to enter the labor market, though. And then almost everybody has a different experience of their institutions. Even students from traditional institutions have remarkably different retelling of their experiences of college once they try to get a job. And so I didn't wanna conflate their experiences with the labor market, with their experience of the organization. I think it's interesting to perhaps do the other, but I was less interested in that for this study. So they're all currently enrolled, trying to finish all of them. For those at the top end, the swagger's, their biggest problem was maxing out of their student loan eligibility, right? Which puts their student loan borrowing at somewhere around $100,000, $120,000 to $30,000. That means they had borrowed so much that they couldn't borrow enough to continue being enrolled. And there was a vast system of both formal and informal information networks to help them find money to stay enrolled. The for-profit colleges that they were enrolled in would help them try to find private loans, et cetera, try to find somebody credit worthy in their family who could co-sign on a private loan, would work with them on those, but if they could not get the money, would be dropped from enrollment. So their most negative experience is usually was not of the people who had enrolled them, but of the financial aid officers who would drop them when they couldn't pay that next quarter's tuition. But for them, that still was not a negative, while they had lots of negative stories about it, they mostly attributed that to their persistence. So when you need to make meaning of your educational experience, you will do a lot to make that happen. And when you don't understand maybe the prestige hierarchy of higher education or maybe even more so when you do, right? You attribute some meaning to it based on prestige. They knew they were not going to a well-received or highly regarded institution, but what they said to me time and time again is, yes, but I have $130,000 in student debt, it's worth at least that much. The high debt then was not for them an indicator that there was a problem, but an indicator that they had persisted. It became a prestige marker. Why would they let me borrow, they being us, why would they let me borrow $130,000 if it wasn't good? I have invested $130,000 in myself. The language of investment came up a lot. So all of this work we've done for trying to encourage people to go to school that's told them it's an investment might be a really good narrative, but unless we do some other work of educating the public, it's a real problem. Because most of the people I talk about used that to justify their significant student loan debt. It's not a problem if you borrow $130,000 if it's for education. And the for-profit college financial aid officers who were responsible for trying to keep them enrolled knew that and used that, right? So what are you gonna do? You're this close. What are you gonna do to have this investment pay off for you? Who are you gonna go talk to? How are you gonna raise the money? What are you gonna do? And so there were lots of those conversations. But again, I think suggests how even if the system is predatory and even if their experiences are objectively predatory for the students, they may not experience it that way. And I think one of the lessons for us is how we may be communicate policy and interventions for students. We think sometimes that what we're telling them is, oh, they're just gonna take all your student loan money is a warning. Well, it may be for some students, but for other students, given the messages that we've given them about higher education, it may actually be the exact opposite. That is so helpful because we're actually, currently these days working on warnings on the GI Bill college comparison tool and the Department of Education's comparison tool so that when people are picking colleges, they can see the debt levels. But that's really interesting. And I think it is important for them to know them. Don't get me wrong. The note, and especially a visual, it's always great. But context helps a lot. So I wanna ask you to describe a couple of the people. But first I wanted to offer just one other sort of different perspective, which is that in our organization, Veterans Education Success, we do a few things. One is research and to policy issues. And you talk a lot about the lack of data linkage and lack of data talking to each other, we're working on that with the federal agencies as our partners. And we work on policy and improving policy, but we also work on direct service. So we serve more than 3,500, it may be close to 4,000. I don't know, I'm looking at my legal director. Veterans and service members providing free legal advice and assistance after they've been deceived. So they come to us for help and say I was deceived. And it's very interesting because I agree with you that maybe people don't feel that they were duped until after they get out, but some of them feel that they were duped once they get in. So what we hear from the veterans we serve is, and it may be that veterans are very different population because they are targeted, because of the 90-10 loophole, they are actively targeted by for-profit colleges. They have far denser information networks about for-profit colleges than the typical student has been my experience. So I spent some time in California on a Naval base, and they were just more sophisticated about talking about it, period. I think, again, because of the density of network ties, they have so many people that they know who have been through the process, which is far different than I think most people in a general population. And one thing that they tell us is like those dense social networks that they often wind up at School X, for-profit School X, because everyone in their unit went, or the commander just told them, you should all just sign up, and so they just do. But what they come and tell us is that they were profoundly disappointed by the quality of education. The tuition wasn't what they were promised. They were promised the GI Bill would cover everything, and it should because it's very generous, and it covers a free ride at public colleges. They were promised that it would cover the full thing, and then they found out they had all these loans they never signed up for. The teachers weren't real teachers. It was like another student was teaching the class who was just there like the last semester. They didn't know what they were talking about. The materials are out of date. Their equipment is out of date. If it's like technology, technology is like a decade old and broken. They're lied to about the kind of campus support they're lied to about job prospects in particular. And so when they come to us, they're pretty pissed off that they were lied to in all these ways. So it's very interesting that you met a different group and it may be because of the 1910 loophole that we're seeing vets who... Yeah, so actually I would attribute it to that. I would also attribute it to, again, the density of their social network ties. Again, some of the military people I've got like JJ in the book who is clear about he can clearly articulate the credentialing scheme to me better than anybody I'd interviewed in the book. And I think I attribute that to him having been in the military, right? So if we think about what the military is, it is in its own labor market. It's like you've been employed the whole time you've been in the military, you actually have. So one of the reasons, for example, they know the equipment is out of date is they've used up-to-date equipment. Well, if I'm training for a profession that I've not yet been able to enter, I don't know the equipment was out of date until I try to go get that job and they tell me the equipment is out of date. That's an excellent point. Right, so I think that's kind of part of their exposure to the labor market as they're doing it, makes them vastly different and makes them a little harder to hoodwink, which many of the missions people that I know over the years have said. Yeah, that is such a good point because you're right, the military is a well-structured and well-organized machine. They're gonna see leaders who know what they're talking about and then they show up in a classroom and look at the leaders. Yeah, they know that this is different, right? So, and they may be harder to hoodwink. The problem is that many of the four public colleges still do. We had a campus president whistleblower who worked with us and eventually worked with the Justice Department who said, we will do anything and say anything to get the GI Bill. So that was unfortunate. I was hoping that you could make the book come alive a little bit by just if you would, talking a little bit about Morehouse Mike, London, and Janet. Sure, so... Before you start on Morehouse Mike, I went to Spellman. So just... I know that's important information. Take it easy. I know that's important. Thank you. Thank you. I'm actually surprised you didn't lead with that information. I've always wanted to, but I did not. As someone who has also spent a lot of time in Atlanta, I know and I bow down accordingly. Thank you. That's right. Yes, none of this I'm saying applies to Spellman. Okay. I figure. Thank you. Just clear. It is true, by the way, as somebody who has taught before, part time over at Spellman when I was in graduate school, the sharpest people I've ever met in my life. Y'all are amazing and a little terrifying. That's a fact. A little terrifying. The poor boys at Morehouse cannot always say the same. But okay, so Mike is... You know, he's interested. Again, I was enrolled. I was doing my graduate work at Emory University in Atlanta, which was a really interesting place to be doing the work. And in fact, I don't think I could have chosen a better field site. So Atlanta has one of the highest densities of higher education options of almost any metro area in the country, you know, outside of the ones you probably assume, New York, DC, et cetera. But it's not just the density is the composition of their higher education market that I think is really special, right? So they not only have a lot of higher education choices, but they have a, for example, a density of historically black colleges, minority serving institutions, as well as a robust community college sector and trade sector, right? So you not only have lots of options to go to college, but you have lots of options to go to what we call a culturally responsive institution. And because of that, even if you maybe yourself didn't go to college, it's quite possible to grow up in Atlanta and have lots of direct experience to college, exposure to college, just because of your cultural ties, right? You may come from a poor black family in Atlanta, but you grew up going to the parties at Morehouse and Spellman, right? So you had some, a level of college awareness and exposure that I think made the population in Atlanta quite different and special to kind of be doing this work. And so I don't know that this could have happened anywhere else, but I meet Mike at the mall one day, we're at Lenox Mall. And I happen to overhear a conversation between he and a friend where he's telling him, I think the way he says, I can actually still remember it. He goes, you know, now man, don't worry about it. I got a girl who can get you to homework, but the financial aid is easy. Like you'll get your refund check in like two weeks. And so I'm in the middle of my research project, my ears are primed for this. I ended up talking to he and his friend, they joined my sample of students and he becomes just sort of a representative of some of the trends that I say are important for us to understand in all of higher education, we really justify the worst case scenarios for students against the best case scenario, right? And we say, is this a risk socially we're willing to take, right? So like we know everybody is not going to go to the most elite colleges in the country, but we support it sort of publicly because we say that's all right. Those who do get there, you know, it's worth the risk for all of the other students who won't. So my question for for-profit colleges, again, some students have an experience that they call positive, right? There had to be students who empirically were having a positive experience. It would even make sense that you have students who graduate and get a job and are doing just fine. It's just numerically, it's got to happen. So Mike would be an example of the best case scenario. And for me, it was about comparing his experience to the typical experience of the worst case scenario. The students who would have the most likely experience, right? Dropping out, cycling in and out, taking on significant debt, loan defaults, et cetera. And so Mike is the success story. Middle-class African-American at attendant Morehouse undergrad and he'd been talking to his friend that day about enrolling in Strayer College for a master's degree. And I said, well, why Strayer? And he was like, well, why not? I was like, well, it's a little different, right? You had to know that Strayer was different. You had gone to Morehouse. And Morehouse doesn't just enroll you, they acculturate you. And so you had to know that this enrollment process was quite different. And he was like, well, yeah, of course I know that. So, okay, well, explain it to me. And his experiences were about a couple of things. He was intensely aware of something that Janelle has studied a great deal. The likelihood of him maybe not being unemployed, but being underemployed. He was acutely aware of that and was, in fact, aware of it for the very reasons we would consider him successful. He was aware of it precisely because he had become middle-class, precisely because he had attended a traditional college and it had a sort of cloistered liberal arts college experience and undergrad. He had gotten out of college and he's looking around and he realized that his colleagues and peers who were not black but had the same level of educational attainment were having a vastly different experience of the labor market. And what people were telling him and what he could see in his social networks was that the best way to protect himself against that was to have a graduate degree. He says, look, one day I show up at the 100 Black Men meeting which is like a social organization. He's like doing something very similar to this. They go out into the community and do community-based organizations and they have everybody's name tin at the front. He's like, and everybody else's name tin has letters after their name, right? Mine is the only one that doesn't have any letters after it. M-A-M-S-P-H-D-E-D-D-D-D, you know, they keep coming up with them. He's literally describing for me the experience of credential inflation, right? And that he is experiencing that. For him, it is absolutely practical and rational. He doesn't need to be trained on the culture of going to college. He doesn't need to be trained on the culture of professional jobs. He had gone to Morehouse. He had that covered. He didn't need the social networks and social ties. He had that covered. He needed letters after his name, right? The most efficient way for him to do that was to attend a process where they took care of all of his enrollment and financial aid paperwork. And for-profit colleges do that out of necessity, trying to convert a prospect as quickly as possible to a revenue stream. But Mike's experience of that is he doesn't care why they do it. He only knows that it can be done quickly, right? And what he had been explaining there, he described this sort of robust underground economy of the schoolwork that the students share at Strayer. Almost always taking the schoolwork from a woman, by the way, I might add, who had actually done the work. But they were buying it and getting it from her. And even that is about how for-profit colleges were structured. Because they had such frequent turnover in faculty, and because the curriculum is centrally developed, usually by a central office, meaning the faculty don't design the courses. A curriculum development office does. He could be guaranteed that the course would be the same semester after semester. And that you were unlikely to have the same person teaching it, so there was little risk of them catching on to the fact that this was the same coursework that you were submitting the same paper that had been submitted last semester. Almost all the risk had been taken out of him doing precisely what he had always been encouraged to do. To convert this sort of credentialing process into an opportunity structure for himself. And that's what he was doing. That's the best case scenario. And I think even more so, considering he's African-American and male, who we consider to be particularly vulnerable to higher education going and especially completion. By every metric we have for a young, African-American male, he was doing exceedingly well. And he was still gonna end up with a significant amount of debt. Precisely because the process had not delivered him a rigorous high quality curriculum. I think another important element about Morehouse-Mike, which actually I took away as the key point, was that he was, what I read you is saying is that he was really enrolling to get that student loan refund check because he wanted to become an entrepreneur and he couldn't get a small business loan to start his business. And he really just wanted access to money to start his business. And then he could be at Strayer and didn't have to do any work. Because he didn't get the work for buying it from the girls and he didn't take any effort and he just get the money. And so I read it as a problem of lending. I think the problem of motivating him to go is the credential inflation. The problem of lending is just again about how easy it is to get it. But the problem of inequality is about how a $5,000 student loan refund check is considered capital for him. I mean, we're not talking about a whole lot of money. He was talking about $5,000, $6,000. The fact that we live in a missed social conditions where $5,000, $6,000 is significant capital for someone is about racial and class inequalities in wealth inheritance, et cetera, and access to a more beneficial capital arrangements. So yeah, student loan money for Mike was about the only form of accessible capital. Some of the things that we have cheered and should as those who are concerned about fair consumer lending conditions, for example, should cheer sort of the derailment of sort of cheap credit, especially that left people in debt. So credit cards, et cetera. But what that has done for people who need access to cheap, easy credit is that it dried up a market. If you're African-American, your other resource that you would normally go to your home has been decimated as a result of the recession. And if you're African-American, you probably came from an African-American family that's how those things normally work. And so you probably also likely come from a family who cannot gift you that inheritance. So to participate sort of in our culture of entrepreneurship takes a lot of capital. And for someone like Mike who had the aspirations and had been acculturated to do that, but didn't have access to capital, the lending became part of getting easy access to capital. And as you say, to him, it didn't matter where he got those extra degrees from because he says, I'll always be a Morehouse man. So he's got his, like, sexual credential. That's right. He's got what, and this is them saying this to me. I had my real degree. Everything else after that is just, he said nobody asked, when they put the letters after your name, nobody asked where they came from. Now London is a totally different story. And she's a woman who you describe us, in your circle of intimacy, a family friend who enrolls in a for-profit college every time life becomes untenable. She's in a cycle. And I don't know if you could talk about her a little. Actually, yes, because the cycle is actually, I think one of the things that I would hope would be one of the takeaways about, especially about sort of policy and regulation by the way. So what London is living is in one of these places across the country that can be foreign for those of us who live in major metropolitan areas like Atlanta, like a DC, where there are lots of higher education options. She lives somewhere where there are not many, right? What some researchers have called education deserts. There is not a local public college down the street. There are actually way more of those across this country, by the way, than there are places like Atlanta and DC where there are lots of options. For London, it was just as common for her to drive by the for-profit college as it was for her to drive by the local community college. So she had a great deal of brand recognition and awareness of this place as being the college for her area, which was the local for-profit college. She had cycled in, I think, four or five times over the course of her lifetime into some type of for-profit college credentialing scheme. So she'd done a computer certification, one of these C++-type programs. Over time she had done some sort of mechanical training at the time that we talked she was doing healthcare. So whatever the major sort of occupational focus of the for-profit college sector was at the time, basically, she was enrolling in that. So obviously it was less about her having an interest in a particular occupation than her hoping to just get a good job in a understood occupation at the time. And so she was training to be a medical technician assistant at the local school. I think she's interesting for how she experienced student loan debt. She had defaulted on a previous student loan that objectively was not a lot of money. I think by the time she paid it off it was about $4,000 or so. It's just that it's a lot of money for London. She essentially repays it by letting them garnish her tax refund, right? Again, something that we would consider predatory and maybe a warning signal to the student. For her she was glad, it had paid off her student loan which meant she was eligible to get another one, right? So she had regained her student loan eligibility and was able to go back to a school. And when she went back, went back to another for-profit college. And so for me, I was talking about London, I talked a lot with her about how she understood what this certificate was supposed to do for her. What they had told her at school, what she knew about the job market, what she knew about the job. And she talked a lot about how they told her, you'll be good for this because this is the fastest growing occupation in the country, healthcare, right? So selling again for her this idea of economic stability and growth about how this was a good job because she talked a lot about wanting to wear the uniform, the coat, right? This is how that symbolism mattered, a great deal to her. And having a regular schedule. Even if it meant it was an off schedule, not necessarily first shift, it might have still been shift work, but that it would be a regular schedule because London like lots of women was caring both for her children and then by the time we talked also her grandchildren. And so she's part of sort of this extended care network. And she had started out as a teenage mom. I started out as a teenage mom and which is why she was a relatively young grandmother, that's right. Her young daughter also then has a child fairly early and she's responsible for all of them at various points. Like she, I think of her as being like in the center of this set of concentric circles, you know at any given time she either had two of the grandchildren with her and a child or the child and the cousin, but she was always responsible for at least a minimum of three or four people, you know at any given time from some composition of the people in her social network. And she was the stabilizing factor for a lot of those people. When she attends the Fort Brava College and I talked to her about it from her perspective, this is the college in my community. It's the one down the street and she was right. And she lives in a not quite rural like we would think of it as a development, it's a small town, has a rural background, very limited industry. You're either working in manufacturing or working in the service economy. Healthcare there is growing mostly because they're having an elderly crisis, right? And she was hoping for one of the good hospitals and one of the local rest homes, right? It's a medical technician. And I asked her, I surveyed the jobs in her area and got a sense of the job that she would be applying for and almost all of them required not just the certification but minimum years of experience, something like two to three years of experience and you had to have a medical specialty. So it wasn't just enough anymore to be a certified medical technician. You now have to have it in pediatrics or oncology or whatever the medical specialty is. And I remember asking her, oh, are they training you at the school in the specialty? And she didn't know what I was talking about. She was like, oh, no, no, it's okay. They've told us it's okay because at your first job, that's where they'll tell you what your specialty is. And that becomes your specialty and you'll get it through continued education. But my survey of the local labor market was that that was not how that was going to work at all. So I talk about sort of the disconnect between, we talk a lot about for-profit colleges as being a solution to the jobs crisis of retraining workers for occupations. Well, that only works if they're actually retraining them for the occupations and actually qualifying them for labor market entry. And they talk a lot about training people for healthcare. And because we have such a dominant conversation about how important healthcare is to the jobs of the future, we tend not to ask those sort of more finer grain questions. Are they training them for the healthcare jobs we actually need? London is living that mismatch between what they are training them for as opposed to what the healthcare labor market is actually hiring for. And actually I know, because again, a personal experience, London is still trying to finish you. And it's still hoping to be a medical technician. The medical field is one where we in the Senate and also Center for American Progress done some investigation and exploration. And also Walter here, our policy director of veterans education success and discovered that too often, more often than not, the credentials that the for-profit colleges are giving students are not useful or not needed or insufficient to actually enter the workforce. So sometimes they're giving you a job for medical billing where all you need is a high school degree actually. And sometimes, and then often they're promising that you're gonna get to be like, a sonographer as the New York Attorney General sued one of the big for-profits over one example. And you can't, because you're never gonna be eligible for that job. So. Karen, I just wanna give us a little time. Everyone will storm out if we don't have time for questions. So are we ready to take it to questions? I mean, I could listen to these two talk all day, but we are ready. Margaret. There's apparently a microphone. Yeah, there's a microphone coming around. Thank you all for hosting this event. I appreciate the opportunity to ask questions. So trust me, admittedly I've not finished. So if you use this in the book, forgive the question. But it's kind of a merger between Morehouse Mike and one of the points that you make that social policy reform. It's well fair to work. Contributing to the Proliferation of. Yes, thank you for asking that, yep. So two part question. I'm wondering if you could speak to that, a little bit more than maybe you could in the book and then allow you to speak to, and again, this is what I did, the differences between undergraduates and graduate students and how they perceive their pursuit. So for instance, the idea is about credentialism. If you've gone to Morehouse, right, and you're a teacher, and there's a step that provides for an increase in pay, does it matter if I get it from being extroverted? Nope, that's right. Right, so I'm gonna do this because I don't have to be in class, so I'm gonna take care of my children. Can you speak a little bit more? Remind me about the second one, because yes, I think that's a great point, but I don't wanna make sure I don't forget it. So to the first question about the connection between some of our social policy changes, and I think especially sort of our wholesale changes, I think the move to block grants, et cetera, for welfare and allowing sort of the variation at state-by-state level about the administration of how welfare would work, how that unfolded from my experiences both in North Carolina and then what I was able to observe in Atlanta, this was a very difficult question to observe. It was mostly all just sort of people's memories and experiences of the process, and so that's why I didn't feel comfortable making a strong claim about it in the book, but if anybody ever wants to actually support that study, please contact me, because I still really want to do that. Because seriously, so this is, you can do an assessment, which I've done, right? So you go out and you can get the qualifications for remaining welfare eligible state-by-state, all right? Overwhelmingly say, granted, lots of variation now in state-by-state, and we know how sort of that's sort of unfolded. They overwhelmingly have it, you have to be employed, and what's the other provision? Seeking and not just in school. You can't just go to your local public flagship university and get a liberal arts degree. It has to be in a certificate, occupationally-oriented certificate. They all use the very specific language. When you combine that with the eligibility limits now on welfare in almost every place in the country, there are only a handful of schools and programs that meet that criteria, and guess what sector they are in? For-profit colleges, because they have to be short-term, occupationally-oriented, and won't run out all of your welfare eligibility time. So what I saw in the for-profit colleges when I was working was a woman after woman after woman coming in with her welfare eligibility paperwork, wanting me to certify it. For me to certify it, she had to be in student. To become a student, you had to enroll. And guess what I could do for you when you came into my office? I could enroll you that day. The community college, you don't become a student until all of your paperwork is cleared weeks into the enrollment process, right? So it may be less expensive, but that depends on how much you value people's time and the other sort of non-cash support that they need. They were especially always concerned about maintaining their eligibility for childcare subsidies, right? So for a reduced rate childcare was critical, because you lose your spot in one of those daycares. You don't just get it back when you all of a sudden have the money a few weeks later. You have to go back into waiting lists, back into pools. So maintaining that childcare eligibility was huge for poor women. Yes, for all women. I know as you look at me going, yes, we're all women truly, right? So these connections between the social policy changes that we've made, when we had the assumption that anybody who wasn't working, wasn't working because they didn't want to work. And then what happened was that was not at all the economy we ended up with just a couple of years after we made the changes to welfare. And so what it created, it increased the incentive for lots of women to pursue short-term occupational training. For most of those women in most places, the only person, a place that can offer that to you is a for-profit college. And then so to your second question about, yeah, the credentialing game, I actually think it's a lot more there to be said. One of the biggest consumers in some of the larger metro areas across this country, labor market consumers of for-profit credentials is actually the public labor market. So for example, Strayer and DeVry do great work in Northern Virginia. They do great business in Northern Virginia, not because the private sector necessarily loves those degrees, but because the public sector would acknowledge them and reward them, right? Because it does meet the criteria for you to either be hired or promote it. In Atlanta, what I saw was especially for a lot of African-American women who were either teachers or counselors in the local school system because they had instituted incentive pay for you to become master teachers or to become more specialized. Well, the only way to do that, they were almost like the veterans in that then you had a sort of social network where people of all of you were going to these same schools to do the same thing because it was a way to meet the bureaucratic credential requirement, right? And then you coupled that with the fact that the bureaucracy was willing to pay for it or to help you pay for it. So some combination of usually tuition assistance benefits and the student-laid program would allow you to do that efficiently. I think there's a lot more there to be said. It's a hard thing to do because you need employers to speak to you about how they hire and promote. And in a litigious society, places aren't very open to allowing that type of observation. But when you talk to workers' experiences of the bureaucracy in many ways, we end up incentivizing them to do precisely this. Take one from this side. Thank you. One of the things that seems to me that we haven't talked about too much is the fact that the poor-profit schools exist in an ecosystem of education, community colleges in particular, which don't do any of the things that you talk about, and you just mentioned community colleges, but they're not very friendly. They take a long time. You have to take three-hour semester courses forever. If you need remedial education, it's a huge expense because it's offline from, and they give almost half of their people remedial education. So I can see why people would be attracted to the for-profit, but it seems to me that you're gonna have to do something about the community colleges and the universities as well as crack down on these bad guys. Mm-hmm. Which I also talked about that in the book she writes about how bureaucratic the enrollment process is at the public's and non-profits compared to how quick and easy it is and friendly. I'll take care of everything for you. You just signed here. Yeah. And we have to pay attention to, so I want to defend public higher education a bit, but also I will be very honest. I mean, for those of you who know sort of like my broad sector work, I'm not a lewdite about these things. We are gonna have to change. We are changing. We actually change fairly well. We just don't change as fast as efficiency fetishists like for us to do, but there's a reason for that. A lot to change really, it actually makes people really terrified. So you kind of have to manage, which is kind of trying to manage both rapid change and sort of maintaining sort of the integrity of a system and its quality. And that's actually very hard. But the sort of cultural capital that you need to manage a bureaucracy is a middle-class inheritance, right? And lots of people actually don't know how to manage a complex bureaucracy. And then when you throw them into higher education and say, yeah, figure out, sort out which of these offices you need to talk to on what day and in what right order to get something done, that was overwhelming for me and I have a PhD in study higher education, right? So I went through sort of the community, the local community college process of trying to speak to someone in admissions just to compare the systems. I mean, I knew it from the literature, but there's something different about experiencing it. And it is complex, but I would point out a couple of things. I think that there are changes that we have to do to public higher education to make it more accessible to students. Absolutely has to be done, especially as the composition of our student population continues to change, right? We cannot rely on students coming to us with, again, that type of cultural capital that knows how to navigate a bureaucracy. We're never going back to that. There just aren't enough of those students being produced for us to keep our education and it's just not gonna happen. And we don't want that to happen. The consequence of having greater access is you gotta have different kinds of students coming in. But that takes money. It isn't that for-profit colleges are better at remediation is that they don't do any, right? What they are better at is enrolling students who need remediation and then tell them you don't need it. But that doesn't change the fact that they probably actually did need it. Remediation, remediating the inequalities of the K through 12 system is a time consuming, expensive process. And right now the only part of our system that does that are community colleges and open access public institutions. There is no shortcut around that process. The best we can hope for is to manage the cost of that process. But there is no fixing that. There's no technological solution or efficiency for that. But that does not mean I think that the admissions and sort of caretaking student support role cannot be better retrofitted for the likely student. And for that, that's both a combination of culture problems and regulation problems. Yeah, and I think there's lots. But even if we do that, I would point out for unless we do a better job of talking to students about these differences, this assumes that the students I talked to in the for-profit colleges in Atlanta had compared institutions. And overwhelmingly, and we even see in research the likely for-profit college student is not shopping around. They are going to the first place that answers the phone. Right? Another really important difference with community colleges is the spending choices. So in the Senate committee, it was very diligent, difficult work that I did not do, but my colleagues did, of breaking down exactly every dollar at each of the 30 for-profit colleges, how it's spent. And then you compare that to community colleges. So for example, at community colleges, and AFT is here, at one point, AFT bunch of college presidents came in to talk with us. And I said, okay, raise your hand. It was like 30 college presidents. Raise your hand if anybody here spends at least 5% of your budget on recruiting and marketing. No hand goes up. Okay, raise your hand if anybody spends at least 2% and no hand goes up. The for-profit colleges, the choice that they take is they take all that Title IV aid and GI Bill dollars and they turn around and they spend 22% of it on recruiting and marketing. So of course they can make the recruitment process easy. For instance, at University of Phoenix, for 400,000 students they had, oh my gosh, I'm gonna blank on the number. I think it was 8,000 recruiters, is that right? 8,000 recruiters and zero job placement assistance. So you're not gonna have that number of people in enrollment at community colleges. The other big spending choice difference is they then obviously, because they're designed to make profit, they set aside another about a quarter to profit. And then they take the rest of it and they pay exorbitant salaries. So eight times and 10 times what the president of Harvard makes to the head of it. Leaving very little for education. So for example, we studied one for profit college that had bought an existing small liberal arts college at which the spending per student per year was about 12,000. They quickly drop it down to 5,000 and they quickly drop it. Within 12 months they get it to $700 per student per year. It's how much they're spending on education. Now at community colleges they're spending more than the tuition, right? They're probably putting in like 30 grand a year into each student and they're not getting that. I'm just thinking also about this, this is not a very accessible and you have to take these. You can't take a continuous course, which you need because you have to take these three hour courses and half of them are in the middle of the day. But they are, I would say that's true but they're also getting better. They're particularly getting better at competing online. I think for profits I think made a fortune because they saw this online opportunity and the non-profits and publics were slow together. Yeah and that market position edge, they lost that by like 2000, 2001. I mean, granted, traditionals should have been there earlier and better but the rhetoric that they have about us being recalcitrant just does not hold anymore. There's plenty of competition actually in the online market which is actually why they're shifting their attention to other things. But yes, no, I absolutely agree. There are plenty of people who agree that the accretion at traditional universities is a beast to navigate and to manage. It is harder to get rid of something than it is to create something new at that level because there are different sets of processes to do it. And there are lots of incentives that we should probably change but what we probably shouldn't change is the investment in again a really kind of expensive time consumer process which is again remediating students and doing labor intensive skill and critical thinking development. Thank you so much for being here. I think you talked about this a little bit earlier in talking about the connection to the changes in post-welfare reform about accessing higher ed and welfare benefits with the childcare subsidies. I kind of wanted to go more into the single mother population at for-profit colleges. So I think that's really interesting and I think we know that in more traditional colleges that there's plenty of parenting students but we don't see them a lot and they don't even talked about a lot. And so I was sort of wondering if there's anything that for-profits promise to parents and especially single mothers about going to that school like whether it's your education outcomes or if it's supportive services but what are they promising to mothers that maybe our traditional institutions aren't really there yet? Yeah, so thank you for that question. Again, I also think it's a really interesting question. I'm working with a paper right now on my colleague, what we call college for baby mamas looking at exactly that intersection of race parental status and institutional affiliation. So your question about what they promise, no, none of those things that you would actually think would be promised, absolutely not. Those are all very expensive things. They do, however, do something I think, that I do think is important sort of at the cultural level. So for example, at that enrollment but that point of enrollment which is very, very important to students and especially important to students who have never had a response of bureaucracy, right? They do invite the students to bring their children along, for example. It seems like a really small thing but for lots of reasons at our traditional institutions we don't do that. Because what we're telling non-traditional students is, yeah, we know you might be different but when you're here pretend that you aren't. So you're not gonna go to your financial aid appointment with your children at the traditional college. Again, there are reasons for doing so maybe motivated by profit but the reality is when you call the enrollment officer at a for-profit college and you tell them, well, I don't know if I can come because I'm gonna have my child with me. They go, bring them, bring them. It's not a problem. I remember walking into one for-profit college lobby and an entire corner of the section was just car seats, all right, lined up up front. It seems like a small thing but actually no, having some way to drop your kid's car seat when you come in so that you can sign your paperwork actually does make your life a little better especially in a life where again there are not a lot of those conveniences but things like childcare support or wraparound services, absolutely not. The other thing though that they do promise them that I think is the trade-off for lots of women who are also parenting is they promise them their time, right? The time thing is the big one. They promise that you will finish this fast, right? And actually that's hugely important to you if you are managing those sort of conflicts because again, your real problem is you don't have enough time, right? You could actually do all of these things if you had somebody to give you a few extra hours a day and what for-profit colleges say is we can both get you enrolled fast, get you through the program fast and get you into the labor market fast and for women who are parenting that has a particular sort of quality and incentive. I mean, it's true for I think for lots of the students enrolled in for-profits but I think for women, single mothers is especially important. And sometimes it's a lie. So currently in our database of veterans that we're serving, it's very interesting because you can see trends where you can figure out which schools are lying about which things and University of Phoenix must be lying to the veterans about how long it will take to get the degree and how many credits they need because we have so many of them saying they said it would only take 30 credits and now they're saying it before and they said it would only take, this is a member's master's now, it's this number. So like there's a bait and switch. For your presentation, I just wonder if you have a data analysis somewhere for yourself about the college degree and their training and whether there is employment to the out-of-state or some state now they claim their increasing job is tremendously compared to other areas they say employment rate is high. And some say you don't, you can have a degree but their training is not really according to the standard that we think should be. Instead they say your supervisor would tell you what to do. So do you have just type of data, some to me is a little bit arbitrary and it's just that it was going wrong and I would like to explore the type of things. So this is about the connection between the local labor markets which I actually think is a great question because of course we're not in a natural labor market except for a couple of professions. Almost all of our labor markets are actually fairly local and what are the connections between the credentialing that the students are getting and whether or not they're meeting the need, the local labor market needs or they're having to travel to other labor markets. Do I understand that correctly? Your question? If they're doing a good job of training for the local labor market needs. The employer doesn't, oh, right, right. I gave you a job. So I only know of one paper that has sort of looked at that level of analysis and blanking on their names and what they, but I think their major finding was that what you see across labor markets is that most of the students who attend for private colleges like those who attend community colleges stay within the state. And there does seem to be some connection between sort of changes in the local labor market and how many students as a response then seek out a credential. So but now whether that's positive and whether they end up employed in that job or not, no, we don't have data on that. We don't have great data on the connections between higher education and the labor market for lots of reasons that I actually do talk about in the book. We don't have that type of information, so it's difficult to say. But it does, I think, complicate the notion, I think, of the other part of your question about whether or not we should be subsidizing or using sort of tax incentives to incentivize these types of things unless we know that those connections are there. I don't know of anybody who has any data that says that there are or how those connections work. I think we should have this be the last question so that we leave time for Tresi to sign books. All right, sorry about that, but thank you very much for coming out. Did you explore or learn anything about whether or not the decision to choose a for-profit institution had anything to do with the K-12 experience? Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes, and mine isn't the only finding that there are a couple of other really great recent-ish papers who I think are finding the same sort of things. So I found, for example, Mike was actually an example of that in his own way, but lots of the students, again, it's really easy for those of us who did well in school and who liked it, like I was a kid, so it's okay, to realize that for many people that is not their experience. And so yes, lots of the students I talked to had had negative experiences of K-12. School was not an enjoyable process. They were not excited about re-entering that relationship and anything that felt like that to them primed all of that. And I actually think this is true for all of us. I say that when you put any adult who's gone through formal schooling in a room, we all revert to who we were in the fourth grade. And seriously, everything about that process, the enrollment process at for-profit colleges doesn't prime that. They don't sit in on a class, I mean, you can and there are some schools that do that, right? But it's not oriented around the classroom experience. And in fact, I had recruiter after recruiter tell me things like, oh no, don't worry, it's different here, right? The faculties, you do this type of thing different for you. And if you ever have any problems, you just go see the dean. You don't even have to, there are no middle points. You can go straight to the dean, right? And because we don't have that, you know, that weird faculty governance thing, we can actually have oversight of our faculty here. And so, you know, if you have a problem with faculty, but from the student's perspective, who we know and we know who was more likely to have that kind of experience. Poor children have that experience and children of color across class have that experience. Hot style K through 12 learning environments. And so, to go into a school where, granted, it's being motivated by the idea that the student is the consumer. But my experience of that is, oh, somebody here is going to listen to me if I have a problem and they aren't just gonna automatically believe the faculty or the teacher. That actually matters a lot. And again, especially from those students who are sort of a set by various inequalities. But yeah, that actually came up a lot. Thank you for that question. And then when the school underdelivers, over promises and underdelivers, I think people who had a difficult time in K-12 talking up to themselves and say, either they say, yeah, life always sucks, it always does. And here's another example of how it sucks. Or they say, yeah, I've always been a bad student. It's gotta be my fault. We sometimes have to help our veterans understand that being lied to is consumer fraud and it's not their fault. No, seriously, yes, I think that's a wonderful point, Kerry, especially again, for the women that I talked to who were enrolled in the graduate programs. Anytime there was an institutional failure, they attributed it to themselves. And anytime there was a success, they attributed it to the institution. Right, and that is very, very convenient if you are the institution. We are gonna leave it at that. Thank you so much to our panelists. Thank you. Thank you very much. I particularly wanna say congratulations on the book to Tressie McMillan-Cottam, and I encourage everyone to go buy it right now, right outside our door if you're here. I wanna thank Kerry Wofford for joining us. And of course, Janelle Jones, thank you so much. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Thank you for the careful reading and the great questions. Oh, are you kidding me? That's what I was saying, I saw your notes and I was like, oh, that's great.