 It's my pleasure, distinct honor, to introduce Tressy McMillan-Cotton, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and what we're proud about, faculty associate here at the Brickman Client Center. She's a co-editor of two volumes on technological change, inequality, and institutions, one of those being digital sociologies and the other for profit universities, the shifting landscape of marketized higher education. I'll let her tell the rest. Thank you all so much. Hello, everyone. Truly, it's hot outside in the summer, and so I did not have great expectations, but look at us. We filled up the room, and I know that's partly because of the food, but I take it where I can get it. So, it's nice to be back here at Brickman. Let's see, so now three and a half years ago, I think was my first time in this space. I've done research in the folks at Brickman that had me over, so thank you for having me back. Yet again, I'm always looking forward to continuing our relationship. So this is how I'm going to try to do today. I'll try to keep track of my time, because I know we are live streaming, and people have places to go, especially once the food is gone. So this is how it's going to go. I will give an overview of my latest book, Lower Ed, the Troubling Rise for Profit Colleges in the New Economy, which is really the way I tend to like to do this, especially when I have an audience that, my experience has been as engaged as the audience usually is here at Berkman, which is to tell sort of the story of the making of this research project and the making of this book. So it's a bit overarching. It is probably important to keep in mind that I'm a sociologist, and so my questions are driven by sociological theory and methods, and I'll touch on that a little bit, but it won't be a sort of standard sociological talk. Depending on who you are, that's either a very, very good thing or a bad thing. It's mostly a good thing if you've been to a sociology talk. All right, so I'll go and I'll try to leave plenty of time for questions and answers. You should know that I'm very open to spontaneous feedback as I go through. I come from the call and response tradition, and I'm very comfortable with that. So as I'm going through, if there's something, please feel free to speak out. If I ask you to hold it, just hold it till later, and we all get along fine. All right. So why do I end up doing what I end up doing? This is the big question. All right. Again, not a typical sociology talk, right? So I come at the question of what are for-profit colleges by asking why are for-profit colleges, right? That's the question at the heart of this research project. I'm asking why they are, as opposed to say expanding higher education by building a thousand new community colleges, as opposed to maybe expanding access to four-year comprehensive colleges, we over the last 25 to 30 years in higher education and in U.S. higher education policy had decided to respond to the demand for higher education by not increasing access to public higher education, but by shifting that demand to the private sector, right? And that was actually historically distinct, right? We had not expanded higher education that way in previous waves of higher education expansion, and I thought that mattered. Well, I also thought that mattered because of my personal experience with for-profit higher education. So back in the 2000s, I worked at two for-profit colleges as an enrollment representative, as you see there. And in the book, I described these as in looking back sort of over my personal history when I was writing this book. In many ways, my experience at these two for-profit colleges were representative of the ways that for-profit higher education has ended up being organized. You had this large sector of shareholder, corporately owned and traded for-profit colleges that were really driving our public imagination of what for-profit higher education was. Those are the ones that had the billions of dollars to spend on Google Web ads and television ads and radio ads and the ads that you see on the bus and when you get on the red line, right? Those are the ones that had sort of pierced the awareness of sort of middle America. But there was also the second sector of for-profit higher education that has slightly less money to spend on branding and advertising, but that was still a very robust part of for-profit higher education. And those are the for-profit colleges that are like the beauty school, which is where I also work. So these are schools that are offering very narrow and specific credentialing for occupations. Generally in occupations that do not require a college degree but require some kind of licensure, often instituted by some sort of regulatory board. So in the instance of cosmetology schools, for example, is that in most states you have to sit for the state cosmetology license and someone has to qualify you for doing so. Now these schools are the ones that loom very large in the public imagination, gets the lion's share of the public policy attention and sort of public discourse and public media attention. But it remains true, and I always want to point this out, that it is still that the largest part of for-profit higher education are the places like the beauty college. And as we are trying to sort of legislate and regulate this sector of higher education, one of my larger points is that we do so at the expense of not paying attention to the full spectrum of what the credentialing economy and for-profit higher education is serving, particularly who they're serving. So I've got three big points for my talk today that come out of the book and I want to make sure I start with these and then I'll unpack them as I go along. The first is that when I started this project, we only had a couple of ways of thinking about how for-profit colleges existed and why they existed. So we had this sort of rational choice framework, which basically gets summed up as this. People based on who they are make a series of trade-offs about what resources they will pursue, right? So we make very rational choices and based on who you are and where you are and what you think the trade-off is, this is how you decide where you'll go to college. Nothing wrong with it, but it's not my approach. Then we've got this sort of neo-institutionalist framework which is really the most dominant way of understanding for-profit colleges at the time that I started this work. And that was saying that for-profit colleges was this sort of innovative sector of higher education and that when innovation was happening, there are always excesses, right? But over time, traditional higher education would pick up sort of the innovations of for-profit higher education models, right? Modify them, adapt them, sort of make them more legitimate, but at the same time also innovate traditional not-for-profit higher education. So in this model, what we saw for-profit colleges as were this sort of innovative sector that was going to prod a long change in the stodgy not-for-profit higher education sector. Both very interesting perspectives that did not answer the question, though, that I had. Both of these are really good at explaining what for-profit colleges are. They fail miserably at explaining why they are, why they are. Rational choice theories assume that for-profit colleges exist because people want them, right? If that's the case, then we don't need to be overly concerned about regulating them because we are providing consumer product to consumers, right? So I tell people all the time, well, yeah, people also want cheese with it. It doesn't make it a really good thing, right? And again, it doesn't solve the problem of why, right? And it also overlooks, tends to underestimate the extent to which people's choices are constrained, right? And what those constraints are. Neo-institutionalism tends to overstate, one, how resistant to change traditional higher education is, by the way, right? And overstate how innovative for-profit market higher education is, right? Understates one and overstates the other. I think if nothing else from the institutional level work that I've done, if I could get out any idea it is this, there's nothing really that innovative in for-profit higher education. And in fact, it is a very low-tech model of higher education delivery overall. Most of the innovation actually in higher education has come from the not-for-profit sector. But the ideologies that somehow profit and being involved in the market makes it more innovative has had some stickiness to it. Credentialing, however, credentialing theory asks a different set of questions that were more interesting from my perspective. It asks, what is happening among different groups of people that is both motivating them to pursue a credential and constraining what kind of credential they can pursue? Now that was a much more interesting question to me for a lot of reasons. So let's talk about what for-profit colleges are very quickly because it gets to why I'm interested in this question. For-profit colleges are colleges that operate exclusively for profit to extract excess tuition revenue for profit. So as the transfer of tuition revenue to usually private or corporate shareholder owners in the guise of profit. The most likely for-profit college student is a woman and is a person of color. They are more likely to be poor than your typical student in the not-for-profit higher education sector. They tend to pay more for the education, take on more student loan debt to pay for it, and have negligible labor market returns. Negligible labor market returns. So from my perspective of having worked in the sector, happened to be a member of the status group that is most likely to participate in for-profit higher education as an African-American woman from a lower middle class background. My questions about this were not what choices people, what their preferences were in higher education, but why this had become the dominant mode of higher education for these groups of people. And that was a social problem question. Yes. And you said negligible returns. Are you going to stay or not? Sure. So negligible returns. You said labor. Yes. You mean they don't get jobs after work? Yes. The best case scenario, so the research on this is mixed, I do talk about it a little bit more later on, but the research on this is mixed. The best case scenario and the empirical research that we have right now is that attending a for-profit college will have no negative effect on your labor market outcomes. That's the best case scenario. Seriously, that's the best case. So that's what I mean by negligible that even in positive terms, it's not that great. So my starting point for this is that something must be happening in labor markets, that is incentivizing what kinds of institutions people attend, and that is not happening, that those options are not equally distributed. All of the options, the constrained options are not happening across the board with different types of students in the for-profit college sector. That it seems to be happening most commonly for those that are what we call disadvantaged groups by race, class, and gender. Contrary to some of the assumptions that had come out of the rational choice theory, I also wanted to start at the position that students are not stupid. That there was some value in the choices that they were making, whether or not we shared their value system. There is a moral economy to how credentials work, and I wanted to understand what the moral economy was for students who attend for-profit colleges. And I wanted to know what their sense-making framework was. How do they make sense of their credentials that are quite different from what we think higher education should work, and it's probably operating differently from how other people they know are attending college, and when they try to enter the labor market, how are they making sense of the value of their credentials? But then, theoretically, those were the social problem issues, but I also had a theoretical problem. The first is that everything about our economic models about how social stratification work assumes that all credentials work the same. All credentials work the same. That's because for about 75 years, that's been true, right? But again, that was when higher education expansion was happening in the not-for-profit sector. This was different, right? And in fact, everything about labor market returns to the students who were participating in the sector said something different is happening for them. Yet, our systems for how we model social stratification still assume that all of these credentials are roughly equivalent, right? And one of the things I argue theoretically throughout this project and my other work is that if higher education credentials are gonna continue to expand in the market sector, we've gotta revisit everything we know about how we measure credentials in our economic and our sociology literature. That stratification is happening differently. So that was my theoretical problem and my social problem. So let's talk about a few numbers and how I went about answering that. So again, I'm interested in sense-making. So I talked to students currently enrolled in the for-profit college sector. I wanted to talk to students who were currently enrolled and not previously enrolled for a few reasons. Everybody's feelings about their higher education institution changes when it's time to repay. Everybody's, right? In both the not-for-profit sector and for-profit college sector. And I didn't wanna compound people's experience and sense-making of how they made sense of the symbolic and cultural value of their credential with now their experience of trying to use the credential on the labor market or as a voucher for the exchange of social status, which is how we use credentials, right? So the students I talked to are currently enrolled. I'm interested in their experience of the part of the for-profit college process that is most profit, right? That is most deeply enmeshed in the market-based system. And in the for-profit college sector, that is how they enroll students, right? So I focused on the enrollment process at nine for-profit colleges. I chose them based, there's a model from the Institute of Higher Education that a classification system of for-profit colleges. So I chose them for their diversity. Basically, I'm looking at a few things. Are for-profit colleges organized the same way not for-profit colleges are? Believe it or not, in the research literature, we weren't clear on this. Again, everything in our sociology literature, especially, was assuming that people went to for-profit colleges the same way they went to not-for-profit colleges, right? We didn't understand the admissions process. We didn't understand how that process might be shaped differently for different kinds of students, right? And so the very first thing I kinda needed to start with was whether or not this process was different and what was different about it. So that looks like me enrolling at nine for-profit colleges over nine months. And then, again, I'm interested in sense-making and I'm interested in how market-based processes shape how for-profit colleges recruit and enroll students and whether that is about their profit motive, about who the students are, or if it's some combination of the two plus some like regulatory environment stuff, right? So I talked to for-profit college executives. All of these people were at executive level function and above, so the sort of quote-unquote C-suite of people. So these were the directors of enrollment or admissions, the directors of marketing, a couple of chief operating officers, et cetera. First, let's keep in mind empirically what our social problem is. Whatever is happening in the new world of higher education credentials in the for-profit sector, it's not happening for everyone, right? For-profit colleges disproportionately serve older students, women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and those with low incomes. I'd like to expound on that just a little bit before I start to talk about the enrollment process, right? So we tend to think of for-profit credentials as, again, being those that are offering certificates at the lowest level of higher education. I always think it's important to point out that actually the fastest growing part of for-profit higher education for about the last seven years has been at the graduate level, right? They offer certificates in everything from, yes, I promise. They offer everything from certificates in auto-mechanics to PhDs in clinical psychology. It is entirely possible if you are an African-American woman especially, for you to attend college, from everything from post, immediately after high school, all the way to a terminal degree entirely in the for-profit college sector. And in fact, that is increasingly what we are seeing happen. This represents an entirely different segment of higher education, but again, not for everyone. The fact that we don't know how that process works completely undermines our ability to know how education is working for those who need education the most, right? Because here's what we know about being African-American and Hispanic in the labor market today. At every level of educational attainment, African-Americans and Hispanics have almost roughly usually doubled the rate of unemployment as white workers, right? African-Americans with a college degree report having greater income volatility than do white workers with less than a high school diploma. African-Americans take on more student loan debt and can reasonably assume that they will be paid less than every level of educational attainment over their working life course. The social problem then is not just about the fact that for-profit colleges exist, but for whom they exist, right? And what that means over the life course for people who are cycling in and out of the sector, which again is increasingly true for people who are cycling in and out of for-profit colleges many times over their working life course. If I have a favorite bad statistic as this one, this is a gendered phenomenon, right? 64% of those enrolled in for-profit colleges as of Fall 2014 are women. That's a relatively stable statistic. It's been somewhere around 65, 66% for the last 15 years. Anytime you hear somebody talking about a story about for-profit colleges, assume that the face that they're talking about is a woman, right? So if we know what the sort of macro labor market returns are for African-Americans, that Hispanic workers, we can generally assume and be generally correct to assume that they are worse for women. African-American women, Hispanic women, working class, and poor white women. The nonprofit sector women dominated every level, yes, of higher education participation. I think overall right now, for all of higher education women are about 55%. Yeah, yeah, great question, thank you. So yeah, it's a macro trend for everybody. It's just most acute in the for-profit college sector. This might be why we see a recent report by those of the AAUW show that most of the student loan debt in this country is held by women. I suspect it's deeply tied up in these patterns of higher education expansion about where women are attending college. So as I'm doing all this work of talking to people and thinking about the sort of social problem, I'm also thinking about what do we know about how the market shapes how these organizations work, the institutions themselves. And again, especially that marketing and enrollment function. So to get at that question, I looked at all of the securities and exchange commission filings for shareholder for-profit colleges. I looked at them college marketing materials and I looked at all the state, federal and consumer action case filings. I have some folks from the ITT legal studies team in the room. So I followed those, because I wanted to get an idea of whether or not, when we're talking about whether these credentials are legitimate, how are we talking about who they're legitimate for, how regulatory agencies exert some influence over what will be considered a real degree and for whom. Now that I've told you about how it's all set up, let's talk about my major findings and what my argument is. So when I'm talking about lower ed, I'm talking about a social process as much as I'm talking about a set of institutions. And this is how I define lower ed. It's all of that credential expansion that results from structural changes in how we work, unequal access to quote-unquote good jobs, and the risk shift of job training from states to individuals at individual cost. And that this is being done exclusively for profit because this is always sort of happening in all the traditional higher education. The number one reason almost all students attend colleges, if anybody here is ever taught and you ask that question, why are you here? And they go, because I want a good job. And we do these annual surveys of incoming freshmen and that's pretty much been the answer off and on for about 15, 20 years now. So all students are attending school because they want quote-unquote good job. Those students who are attending in for profit colleges, however, want a good job and have found that there's no other avenue available to those who will not go to higher education to get one, right? And that's slightly different again, especially depending on based on who the students are. Now, so when I say I'm not just talking about a set of institutions for profit colleges for whom these are the exemplar. I'm also talking about a set of social processes. I want to be really clear about this. It's a question I get a lot. The things that are happening in for profit higher education are happening across all of traditional higher education, right? There is, this is a spectrum of privatization processes, often called the academic complex. Some people call it market higher education, but this has been happening since at least the 1970s, the right way to sort of think about lower ed isn't that they are bad institutions, that they're good institutions. It's what degree of bad are the institutions, right? We see not-for-profit institutions now with for-profit corporations embedded in them that are generating that revenue that makes it possible for all of the traditional age students to get that traditional college experience. We see the sort of arms race for things like intellectual property production, the incentivizing of faculty and researchers to kind of go out and participate in profit-generating activities. These things are happening across higher education. It's just that in for-profit colleges, they are doing that without even the pretense of doing the other parts of the higher education function, right? Yes? Mm-hmm. I think I do. So why do people go to these instead of going to community college? There you go, all right. Yeah, so this comes out in my field research with the enrollment process and in talking to students. So one of the first things you kind of need to know is that I think that if you have been born into a certain cultural milieu for where going to college is normal, we assume everything about the prestige hierarchy that governs higher education to just be tacit knowledge, right, that of course there are schools that are better than other schools, right? I think it's important for us to remember that first of all, we have the highest rate of post-secondary participation than we've ever had in this country and even now it just barely tipped into like 51%. The majority of people historically have not gone to college, right? And would have then some sort of limited exposure first hand to the prestige economy that we take for granted that governs so much of how we do higher education, I say as I stand at Harvard University, right? Quite literally the stand in for all prestige mechanisms in higher education. I'm not even sure we actually write about Harvard as an actual place anymore so much as an idea, right? But that's not normal to the vast majority of people. What students overwhelmingly that I interviewed describe was not that rational choice framework of comparing and contrasting different educational options. Here's what happens for the likely for-profit college student. Something happens to them at work, right? And it becomes really evident to them that what's happening to them at work is because they don't have a degree. They've been passed over for the good shift. They've been passed over for the promotion. They've been told that hours are being cut, right? And these things have happened to them before. It's just that in this moment, it feels particularly salient to them, right? They call the very next institution that comes across their field of awareness, right? And so I'll ask you, how many television advertisements have you seen for your community college lately? Not really. I mean, right, we can be dismissive of the fact that advertising, and I do, and I do think it's one of those marketized processes that we need to be very critical about, but from the student experience of it, here's what happens. I need school, the very next ad that comes across my field of vision I'm going to call, right? Now, from the institutional sort of organizational level process of why that is so efficient, and this is one of the things that I explore in the book, every institution has its likely student. We call it the organizational fuel. It's what, how the whole organization is shaped, who is shaped to serve, right? It's the assumptions we have about the students that we'll serve, right? Do those students know how to work this kind of organization because then that makes their experience of the school frictionless? For for-profit colleges, they don't assume that their students have any understanding at all of attending, of attending college, that they have no bureaucratic awareness of navigating a complex bureaucracy, so when you call that number that comes on the ad, this is called today to change your life, when you call it, a person answers it, as opposed to the community colleges that I called when I was doing my research, where I almost always had to press a one or three to get to the right office, right? Well, something as simple as a sort of that front office bureaucratic process, we don't think about what kind of knowledge you need to navigate it successfully. So when I call and I get a call, press one for admissions, press two for enrollment, press three for financial aid, what's the difference between admissions and enrollment? I knew what it was, to be fair, only kind of barely, right? But what kind of knowledge have we assumed about the person who's calling for them to successfully navigate the phone tree? I can't tell you how many students of those, of the 119 that I talked to, I think it was only something like 15 that had tried to do some sort of institution comparison, right? Price shopping, institution shopping. And of those, it was, yeah, but they answered the phone, right? And not only that, they called me back, you know, what to us sounds like a predatory marketing to the student sound feels like caring, right? And so you see those differences again from the low level of awareness of the prestige hierarchy of higher education, the sort of immediacy of the decision making, and then the organizational structures and the institutions and how they differ in which students they serve. Do colleges themselves understand this? Yes, it was, yeah, yes, some, some, yes. You know, I speak to community college presidents a lot, it's not exactly my area of research. Sarah Goldra Grab has far more work in this area. She's the expert on community colleges, but here's my understanding of where community college leadership is. They know, but their question to you is, yeah, who's gonna give me the money to do it? Right, so at the same time that we've seen these market forces reshaping traditional higher education, we also saw the acceleration of state investment in higher education, which impacts all of public higher education, but really impacts community colleges who tend to rely on it almost entirely for their operating costs. And so what they will say to you is, if you want me to reallocate the labor in my university to the front end for students who aren't even tuition paying yet, then somebody has to pay them, right? So the differences here in the for-profit motive and the not-for-profit motive is whether or not you are going to put your resources upfront to serve someone who is not yet paying tuition as opposed to using that limited resources to best serve the students who have now become your student, right? And that's just being governed by the different ideologies of the market as opposed to being a not-for-profit. A not-for-profit is in many ways honor-bound and in some cases regulatory bound in how they spend their money and that they need to spend it on students who are enrolled, not to prospective students, right? And so they're hamstrung in ways, mostly by morality and regulations in ways that for-profit colleges are not. Yeah, I was just going to ask you, in relation to her first question, could you speak to, there's a character in the book and I can't remember his name on the page, but... Thank you. There's a character in the book and I can't remember his name, but you talk about how he had went to the for-profit college and he had failed an exam like two or three times before he finally passed the exam and that was like an interest exam into the for-profit university. I suspect that it's probably similarly in the not-for-profit space that there are students who can't get into the university because they can't pass these exams, they're maybe harder and whether or not that's true if you could speak on that. Yeah, so when I talk about the unequal access to good jobs, let me tell you, what's sort of embedded in that, I think kind of addresses your question. What's embedded in that, that for-profit colleges are a direct response to are the systemic failures of K through 12, right? So here's where we are. We are now at the logical ends of about, I don't know, 40 years of racing to the top, the bottom, the left and right, whatever the new rebranding of ESA is every few years because it's the same act, it just gets rebranded with every political party, right? So wherever, I don't even know which one we're on now, frankly, but whatever it is, it's sort of test-driven culture in K through 12 that is sort of reorganized the priorities and the incentives in K through 12. We saw the acceleration at the same time that we're seeing these processes reshape higher education choice and access. We're also seeing the sort of within tracking process really heat up in K through 12, right? So the first things that we're sort of dealing with are students who are very differently prepared for post-secondary higher education. Now, that's always been true. I think that now it is probably true to a certain extreme. If you are not on the quote unquote college track in some school districts by the seventh grade, you can graduate high school without the minimum requirements to attend your state and university, right? For which you in part pay for as a tech supporter and is in fact being subsidized in part to educate someone like you. It is entirely possible, for example, in my home state of North Carolina for you to graduate with what we call a general high school diploma. A general high school diploma means you have not taken the necessary prerequisites for admissions to even moderately competitive the state universities in the state college system. The creation of those sort of K through 12 tracks are a response to the sort of state and federal incentives that have intensified the tracking at the K through 12 level, right? That so heavily rely on things like beginning of the year and end of year exams to sort of track students into this sort of educational trajectory. One of the things I argue is that when the labor market starts to demand of people credentials, college credentials just for labor market entry, right? It is going to create greater demand for any credential that will allow someone to participate in the quote unquote good set part of the labor market at the same time that K through 12 is not preparing almost anyone to do so equally, right? So what you've seen happen at this, this is I think the case of the student in the book that you're referencing is that he'd had a negative K through 12 experience. I suspected had an undiagnosed learning disability which was actually quite common for the students that I worked with in the for-profit college sector. And it shows up when he now needs a credential to try to enter the labor market. And if he were to go to a community college or to the local for us, it would have been like UNC Charlotte, the local state university. He would have had to invest in a lot of very challenging remedial courses upfront, often without credit and sometimes at personal expense, right, depending on how the institution and financing is set up. None of those things become a barrier for him in the for-profit college sector. So yeah, so that part about the unequal access to good jobs is as much about the sort of unequal distribution of access to good K through 12 schools and adequate preparation for higher education as it is about the disproportionate access to good as opposed to unequal distribution of good versus bad jobs. All right, well, we're off and rolling. Okay, all right. So from this, this is what I, yes? All right, good. So you're looking in the for-profit college and in the for-profit community, as well as sort of the distribution of for-profit colleges and stuff like that. This sort of thing. And so I'm trying to understand a little bit better what institutions are being included within their definition more. So are things like our affiliated within our for-profit or our institution like the Western Governors or other entities that have very strong assessment-based culture also included with this compared to say like the other end of the sector which we talked about in just a little bit. Yes, yeah, yes, and I'll tell you why I think so. And this is slightly controversial. I mean, you know, I know that people at SNHU and I know like for me to say something maybe slightly different and that's fine. Let me tell you why. Because this is about my level of analysis. It is less about, while it is important what the institutions themselves are doing. So things like the price point of delivery, curriculum delivery, access, et cetera, and the students that they serve that are just gonna make it more likely that some institutions sort of fall into the lower ed sector as opposed to not. I think it's also about the return to that education for the students. And what we still see even at places that do a better job of it than some other for-profit colleges is that they still have remarkably low positive impacts on labor market entry and labor market returns for those students. I'm not saying that's necessarily those institutions fall. It may be with the resources that they're working with and with the conditions of the labor market, there's not much they can do to transform it. But that for me is exactly the problem, right? That to me is the issue that we cannot even allow something like compensity base for-profit or market education to be a social policy solution given what we know about certain labor market conditions, right? So yes, I do unfortunately wanna include them. But again, the idea of what's at the other end of that spectrum, which is this perfectly public sort of transformative college doesn't actually exist. So what I am saying is that there is a spectrum of these activities where you fall on it, sort of depends on, I think how integrated they are into how your organization is set up and what the labor market returns are for the students, but that we're all sort of complicit in it even those who are doing, I think the best that they can do given some pretty bad inputs, yeah. Which actually does get me to this. So thanks, that works. All right, so which gets me to my other argument here, which is that what is really fundamentally happened given what the labor market is demanding. The political ideology to shift investment from public investment to incentivizing market-based activities at all level of resource allocation. So we've seen this in education, but it's also been true in everything from healthcare to housing to every other sort of public resource that underpins our social contract, which has just been the shift to saying that states should do less and the markets should do more. And that in fact the markets can do better, cannot only do more, but the markets can do better. And in fact, one of the common sort of critiques of traditional higher education has been that they've been unwilling to participate in the market in ways that could make higher education better. Well, one of the things that I say in response to that is we actually have a really great example of what happens to institutions that do exactly everything that we want traditional higher education to do. And for-profit colleges lower ed are that. So everything that has been proposed for traditional higher education has already actually been tested in this case. And we can see what some of the complications and the outcomes are. So let's go through a few of them. The first thing is that we say that faculty is a buffer to higher education innovation. Faculty is expensive, tends to be resistant to innovating things like teaching, curriculum development, et cetera. And then in fact, if we could maybe work around things like faculty governance that institutions could be leaner and more responsive. In for-profit colleges, there's no faculty governance. And in fact, one of the reasons why you don't see a lot of faculty voice in my research and in this book is that many of those faculty are operating under non-disclosure agreements. They are for all intents and purposes the perfect ideal, typical worker of the proposed future of all of higher education. And this is what we see in the for-profit higher education model when that happens. Centralized curriculum development that is shipped out to faculty, right? So that it is theoretically more efficient to deliver for students. What we see are questionable learning outcomes and no political checks. So there's no power check in these institutions to defend student interests when those situations arise. So we think about faculty governance being a way to professionalize faculty and become sort of professional enclosure for us. But it has also historically worked to defend the sort of quality of the curriculum for students. And when we get rid of faculty governance in the for-profit college sector, we see a decline in curriculum quality, not an increase. So one of the other things that is often proposed for traditional higher education that already exists in for-profit colleges is this tight coupling with the labor market. You may have heard that we are resistant to the idea of preparing students for the jobs of the 21st century. I believe everybody from your current president to the one before them. They all have the same lingo. Colleges have to do better preparing students for the jobs of the 21st century that we're failing at doing so, right? Well, there is no sector of higher education that has more readily embraced inviting the private sector in the labor market into the curriculum development process than have for-profit colleges. If this was such a good thing and if these institutions were providing something that traditional higher education could not or would not and were providing a service that they could not get anywhere else, for-profit college graduates should outpace other students. The labor market should be rewarding them by hiring them and paying them. And again, we don't see that as we started at the beginning of the project, right? So we don't see that. So then how do we come to understand what role they do serve if they're not serving the role that they say they are serving? Which is the innovate to provide something that the labor market demands that traditional higher education will not provide. I argue that what for-profit colleges and what lower ed have really become was what I call a negative social insurance program, right? Lower ed is absorbing the sort of identifiable trend of underemployment and unemployment in the labor market and what we have known about the consequences of tracking K through 12 for about 25 years. So instead of, for example, maybe going to a workforce development program, students in many local labor markets are instead going to a for-profit college, right? It provides the same buffer in the labor market but with predictably different outcomes, right? So instead of investing, again, what we would have done in like 1978, for example, when we had the massive explosion, explosive growth of workforce development programs, instead of investing in that, what we have decided to do instead is to let the market respond to it. The market's response have been for-profit colleges and from the student perspective of that, it becomes preferable to not being involved in any social policy scheme at all, right? So what students are doing is using the student loan system in lieu of all of the other social programs that no longer exist for many people, right? This becomes particularly important when you think about how important work requirements have become for the social policy programs that do remain. And in doing so, it's part of this sort of macro trend, I argue, of shifting the risk from states and employers to individuals. And the same way that we have, historically, as Calleberg and others have shown, shifted from a pension-based system for retirement to this sort of individual model of 401ks, et cetera, the same way that we have moved from direct healthcare subsidies and support to things like employees sponsored and subsidized programs, is the same way we have moved job training that would provide for both labor market entry and labor market promotion over the life course to things like student loans, 529 programs, and all manner of lifelong learning solutions, which I'll talk about here in a moment, right? It becomes an escape valve for the things that the labor market won't provide for and that increasingly, we won't allow the state to provide for people. So this is how I define negative social insurance. It's a market-based response to predictable collective social conditions. It's not that we don't know those things are happening. This is about a political choice we've made. The way the students experience it is this. They hear the same messages you hear about going to Harvard. They just don't have the resources to go to Harvard. So they're getting the same messages that if you've been fired, you've been laid off, or you're afraid of being laid off, right? Go to school. If they try to do something else, they're even getting it from our social policy, which that other little part of things, like when we ended welfare as we know it, when we said you had to work to get benefits, the other little part of that policy that we don't pay a whole lot of attention to that, which we paid a little bit more attention to was this. Oh, if you can't find a job, the other way you could satisfy this criteria was to be participating in an educational occupational training program. In Atlanta where I did this study, I went to go look at what programs were available to students that would meet the criteria for the Welfare to Work Act. 80% of them were for-profit programs because they have to be short-term and occupationally specific, right? We don't let you stay on welfare direct payment programs if you are in a degree program, right? And since the majority of non-degree programs are for-profit colleges, even social policy has incentivized, especially the poorest among us, to go to for-profit higher education. This is not a surprise to the for-profit colleges themselves and in fact, almost all of their financial documents say things like this. Divide president at the time in 2009, I think sums it up nicely from what I heard from students time and time again. He says, our admissions offices tell us what's going on on the ground. Prospective students are coming to them and saying they've just lost their job or they fear that they might lose their job. That's job insecurity. And on the political side, both on the left and the right, now I take this from the GOP platform, but the left has a remarkably similar sort of position on this, right? That we need more competition in the not-for-profit higher education sector and that we should do everything possible at sort of the policy level to make it possible for for-profit models to operate in this space. Trapped in the middle of students who are hearing what I call this education gospel, which is job insecurity has become an individual problem and not a collective problem, right? And they say, well, I can't go to college any other way. And not only do I now need to go to college to enter the labor market, but increasingly what we're telling people, all people, including those of us in this room, is that we'll need to continue to go to college over our life course, right? And the only solution we have provided for people to do that is market-based education, more lower ed for more people. So if we have a predictable social conditions, we know that this is what the labor market will require of people. The question for me, as well as sociologists and a person is, why have we decided that this should only happen in the private market, right? Why have we decided that this is a market problem? When it looks like it's more of a collective social problem. And I ask that not just for the students that I speak to, but I ask that as a broader social problem. How will I keep my job training up to date in 15, 20 years? I ask this of professionals all the time, and we all just assume, well, I've got a terminal degree. Well, they also once thought that about a bachelor's degree. I think that all of these trends are coming for us to a different degree depending on who we are. That's how we get things like this. I think it is a short jump from for-profit colleges to things like coding and data science boot camps. They're all trying to solve the same problem, by the way. It just depends on how enmeshed they are in sort of the trifecta of higher education regulation. Microcredentials, badges, right? We've got all kinds of possible solutions here, all trying to address the exact same social problem from slightly different perspectives, and all, with few exceptions, assuming that this needs to happen in the market. I actually wondered how the MOOCs fit in with the... God bless MOOCs. I started my higher education career talking about MOOCs. God bless them. I mean, yes, so they were part of this process of trying to... I mean, now they're hitting people with $49. You could sign on for a week without paying anything and you try to get through the course. I mean, obviously things are going in the direction of charging for the process. MOOCs have the problem that all of these, what I call shadow credentials, this is actually the project that I'm developing right now, and I call them, barring from the research on shadow education, the K through 12 level, which is looking at things like Saturday academies and cultural academies that provide this sort of secondary shadow system of schooling. They give some kids a leg up in K through 12 schooling as opposed to others. What I'm arguing is that this constitutes shadow credentialing at the higher education level, which is this sort of operating just outside of the full regulatory force of traditional higher education, all responding to the same sort of social problem. MOOCs were part of that and they all really have, they end up facing the same sort of problems. And I think some of this is about the fact that sociologists have totally neglected this area of research because this is really basic in sociology of education. And that's your first problem is, people have to agree that the credential you're producing is legitimate. And the real problem that we tend to keep having over and over again that MOOCs had, right, this is why as much as the Institute and Price was about generating revenue, it is also because what they found out is that people attribute greater value and legitimacy to something that people had paid for. So you got a legitimacy problem across all of these. The problem is the students don't always know that and not all students need it the same way. So the people, I'm blanking on the name of the study right now, but the likely typical student who was taken a MOOC was employed, white male, Western, et cetera, didn't need the legitimacy of the credential the same way a working class, a Hispanic woman would probably need it. So the legitimacy problem also becomes relative. Not everybody needs that legitimacy from the credential the same way, but most of the models that we tend to develop based on serving students who need it the least, but then are taken up by students who tend to need it the most. Could we hold just to make sure these questions go online? That I didn't hear today, which I heard in the book was financialization. Yes. I wonder if you could speak to that. And also related to that, are you suggesting that rather than a credential expansion, there should be a credential contraction and that relates to what happens next? And finally, can you make sense of the Dream Center Foundation buying EDMC? So there you have a nonprofit community-based organization buying a for-profit that's been on the ropes. So kind of two questions, maybe three, thanks. I was gonna say, you got three there, dude. And they're big questions. So let me take the first, which is financialization, right? Yeah, so financialization is the way I was trying to get around talking about neoliberalization in the book because one is far more loaded than the other and one does way more theoretical work, I thought, than the other thing did. So what you're really talking about with financialization, for me, I was very temporally based, right? So my project starts in the mid-1990s to present, roughly. And one of the things I was arguing similar to some other people in the new economy literature is that some things were very particular to the way this market was working. It didn't mean markets were new and it certainly didn't mean that the neoliberal regime was new. But there was something about the way that we were structuring the financial, the everyday financial arrangements that people were undertaking. That student loans had moved from being this sort of direct cash transfer via the student, to the institution, to being a financialized mechanism by which institutions could now make money. And that that was changing how people were, institutions were using financial aid to shore up other problems in the institutions that were coming from things like state investors, et cetera, and demographic changes. There are just fewer now college-aged students, but that financialization processes had become part of lower ed, in part because we had made inequality profitable. So my argument there is that financialization makes all of that structural inequality I was talking about a commodity, right? It makes it profitable to serve these students. Were it not profitable to serve poor minority students, you would not have a market-based higher education system. You would not have a for-profit college system. So the financialization piece is actually quite important. That is an outgrowth of, again, how our priority, our social policy priority shifted. Financialization became a way for them to say that these programs needed to generate their own revenue. Contraction, now this gets sticky. You may have noticed, again, I'm a black woman, right? Listen, you can't start talking about contracting credentials without talking about for whom it's gonna be contracted. And I'm very sensitive to that. I'm not here if that is the case, right? So on its face, no. I don't know that I think the response is to contract the credential market absent other changes. So if I don't have any other sort of finding from this project, I hope it's this, for us to stop thinking about a higher education credential as the end and start thinking about it as a mediating variable. It is always in conversation with labor markets and social policy. So you can't just make changes to higher education, right? So if you want to contract the credential market, it would need to also happen in conjunction with social policy changes. I'm pretty clear in the book and in my work about what my preferred social policy changes would be. But we are close to a place where we have to decide whether or not we want this investment to happen in expanding credentials or doing some direct economic transfers to other forms of workforce development and economic support. But if you contract the credentials without it, it really just puts poor people and people of color in a very difficult spot, which for-profit colleges know. And I'm fair, I hope I'm fair in saying to them that they have a good point on this. I think they're disingenuous when they argue it, that we're providing something that poor black people and poor brown people won't get anywhere else. I think they're disingenuous as I'll get out. But they are true, the underlying premise of what they're saying is true. It is not like we're about to open the doors of a lead higher education tomorrow. But now that assumes that those are the only two options. And politically, the other options may be difficult, but what I'm saying is that we're also really close to having to do some really political decision-making with higher education. And that's where I think the student loan crisis comes in, we're gonna have to make these choices at some point, we've been able to push it off. The question about not-for-profit colleges getting buying, purchasing for-profit college models, there's several of these. I mean, one of the biggest ones here recently is with the purchase of Pearson out at Purdue. Listen, this is about what I said earlier about this being a spectrum. The idea that not-for-profit colleges, this is the risk that they're taking on. They think that they can give these credentials the legitimacy by being not-for-profit. I say that we don't have a case of that working yet. And each one of these is making the risk that they can be the one that turned that around. I say, you know, let them try it. I think that the case of building a legitimate credential is far harder than traditional higher education tends to think it is. Mostly because we have become arrogant. We haven't had to think about our legitimacy in a long time, right? We really do think we produce it. God bless this, right? No, our legitimacy got produced the same way that our legitimacy now is being undermined. Our legitimacy comes from the fact that in the mid-20th century, you had an overall expansion of the labor market and the professional classes and credentials became a really good way to certify people for them and higher education became legitimate as a consequence. We don't have those conditions right now. And so I say good luck to them with trying. I think it's a fool's errand, but, you know. Yes? I wanted to ask a little bit about the relationship between lower ed and boot camp specifically. And I think you've talked about this a little bit on Twitter and I hope I'm not misrepresenting your perspective, but it seems as though you're sort of arguing that boot camps are the lower ed model applied to a fairly highly educated population in a lot of cases and that it's the success of people going through those boot camps really is a reflection of their fundamental level of preparation and prestige for the labor market that they're trying to enter. So I wonder if you include as part of how you sort of define lower ed both the ways that the institutions operate but also the circumstances of the student populations and what that means if you think about, you know, if we eliminate for-profit institutions and like lower ed models of education, what that would mean for the people who participate in lower ed as a group. All right, so I'll take the two part. I know, right? First part being, yes, no, you accurately represent my argument. So some of this just being built on that there's a reason why I choose the beginning of my time period is the mid-1990s when I'm doing this project. So I will remind not everybody here was alive. Okay, so in the 1990, I was about to be casual with it and I was like, oh yeah, I forget, I can't do that anymore. All right, so in the mid-1990s, there was this thing called the Y2K crisis. Well, it's a real thing. We were concerned about program, okay, look it up later. But the Y2K crisis created the short-term occupational bubble for these certificates. If you remember, so you have places like the New Horizons Center, I've got some of the names in my dissertation, right? But these were for-profit college models that popped up to do a short-term occupational certification for people to get these jobs to reprogram computers for the Y2K crisis, right? All right, A++ certification, C++, C++, et cetera. These are the four parents of the for-profit colleges that you see today, the shareholder ones. The financialization process starts there, right? This is why they became attractive investment models because of the types of students they were serving. There were direct labor market outcomes that could be measured. That's why they weren't worried about things like regulations about their job placement outcomes because they thought all of this was kind of built into the certificate. This is why investors become interested in them. Actually, some of the, you can trace some of these centers as some of the first for-profit colleges that through acquisitions become some of the brands that we know today, they started then. Those are boot camps. That's quite literally what they were. So it is not just that I'm critiquing boot camps on the basis that I think they're personally crazy. I'm like, we've done this before. We know exactly how actually this model goes. These sort of employment bubbles can be quite good for early entrants into that market who again have every other sort of status and legitimacy symbol working in their favor. They become less useful for people who need labor market entry, right? Who are not coming with those things. And so to start chasing, so they in themselves would not be a problem. If people wanted to pay for their own employment labor market training, which I do think we should start to maybe not think of that as normal, but okay. If people have the money, the discretionary income and they wanna do it, that's fine. But that's not what happens. What happens is then social policy starts chasing those programs. So we see something like equip, right? So part of this is that traditional higher education again has been reticent to institutional change and we won't innovate. So we saw in the Obama administration this idea that they were gonna test using federal student aid programs to pay for boot camps, right? So you've got some test cases now happening under the equip program. Well then that's when I become concerned. Because again, we've already done that, right? That's exactly how for-profit colleges started to legitimize sort of their access to expanded access to the federal student aid programs in the 1990s. And again, we see what the logical ends of that are. So I do have a problem with sort of bringing it into the higher education trifecta, financing it, et cetera. Especially when we don't know that that's a national labor market. Those tend to be the boot camp sort of market that they're usually training those people for, tend to be hyper-local markets, right? What is happening in Silicon Valley is not at all what is happening in Nashville. And there's no reason why we should then use the federal system of financing to incentivize those things. So that's the first part of that. And the second part of your question was, yeah. So what we tend to think happens in the for-profit higher education model, marketing and enrollment is best queued for the students they serve. Their curriculum less so. That makes sense, right? So they've got very clean marketing profiles for targeting students to enroll them. But much of the curriculum development, this is to my first point about, we overstate how innovative they are. For-profit colleges have not shown any evidence and certainly none of my firsthand experience of them or reading of the literature of them being particularly innovative with curriculum design or in development in any way that would make it better for the type of students that they serve. And in fact, this is why you see places like Strayer a few years ago, dropped a lot of their, they stopped offering remedial math online because they found out it was extremely expensive to do, which again, we could have told them that. And that the outcomes were not very good, et cetera, et cetera. Right, so now if you need some remedial math, you have to go to an online campus. I mean, you have to go to an on campus, et cetera. They are not innovating in any ways that are particularly different from what we've done at edX or that we were doing anywhere else. Most of their innovations are in marketing. Not in curriculum design or development certainly not any way that's answering our longstanding social ed and learning science problems, which are how do we train students that come with different status cultures, different academic preparation in K through 12, how can we innovate curriculum to both personalize it but scale it for them? For private colleges don't have a solution for that. We conflate their financial prowess with their curriculum prowess and that's a mistake. So what happens if we get rid of that? I mean, I think this is to the earlier point. You see a contraction of the credential market that in the short term negatively impacts people of color, especially women of color. Yeah, that's something we have to think about if it's worth the trade off. I say this, that my shift in thinking about for private colleges as being high cost as opposed to high risk was a deliberate choice. I don't think it's so much about what the institutions cost but the risk of the students who are paying that cost relative to who they are. Now, it sounds paternalistic to say that we would get rid of high risk institutions, you know, that this would be better for poor students. But again, I would never argue us doing that in isolation of doing something else. So in the interest of time, we have two more questions. So I'll have them ask them back to back and you can address them. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. So within traditional higher education, the logic is that some college is better than no college. Yes, thank you for that. So, you know, if you have a master's degree, you are more than a BA, you have an associate's degree or some college. I'm wondering just for the for-profit audience, does that logic still hold? So if I have a master's degree or a PhD from the for-profit arena, do I have greater labor market returns than those who just have a BA? Or is your argument that across the spectrum, it's negative or negligible? Got you. So there are actually a couple of questions and then one, I'm gonna take a speaker's privilege here because it's one of my favorite questions. So I'm gonna make it seem like that was the part of the question you asked because it gives me a chance to answer it. And that is this. So when I went back to how we need to observe how these credentials actually work so that we can revisit how we model educational attainment in our stratification models, this is actually one of the first places that this became evident to me. Since about, I don't know, I know at least in the literature from the 1980s, we had had a trend of some college being better than no college, having some labor market return even if you didn't finish the degree, right? So this would mean if you went to college and you got 18 hours, you still seem to have better labor market returns than if you just graduated high school and never attended college. And this was actually part of our argument for funding things like community colleges and investing in them. So where we know that people are more responsive to leaving school because you leave if you get a good job, right? And you come back later kind of thing that at least they had picked up some hours and that provided a labor market outcome. For-profit colleges actually start to negate that trend. Among for-profit colleges, there is no labor market return to some college. That's actually pretty significant for us when we know that the majority of for-profit college students will at some point withdraw or drop out, right? So the most likely outcome of students who attend a for-profit college is that they will not complete. So they leave with some credit hours, but no degree. Now, had they done that from a traditional university, they still would have some labor market return to what they paid for those credit hours. If they attended a for-profit college, they will not. And I actually think that's a problem. And so your second point about whether it's relative to overall credential or just to the students who attend a for-profit college, which is what I think you're saying, is it within institution or between institutional types? We don't know. We actually have pretty, you know, all of our labor market data is bad, by the way. I mean, you know, it's not great. It's not ideal. We, it's not ideal. And there are lots of reasons for that. But based on the data that we have, Claudia Golden, who's actually here and who emails me to tell me when I'm wrong. So let me make sure I get this right, Claudia, so that you don't email me. Claudia Golden has a lot of work here, as does Stephanie Blanking here, Stephanie's last name, on trying to work with some pretty messy sort of incomplete data on what those differences might be. And this is the best that we know right now that attending a for-profit college at any level after the certificate and the associates level. So there is actually still some return at certificate and associates level, by the way. It gets fuzzier at the post-certificate level, post-associates level. No return between post-associates relative to other for-profit college students and to the relative to all credential havers, both traditional and not for-profit. All of that seems to disappear at the bachelor's degree level. We don't have any good data on graduate degrees, but to be fair, we also don't have that for traditional graduate programs either. Seriously, it's just not something we've, there was such a return, there's always been such a return to a bachelor's degree level in the stratification literature that we just have not paid much attention. One of the things that's happened in the new economy, by the way, of course, is that almost all of the now college degree benefit is actually happening at the graduate level as opposed to the bachelor's degree level, mostly because of a deflation of the value of a high school diploma, but we haven't kept up with measuring that. I don't know of any good data of measuring the labor market returns to graduate level, data either in the traditional or in the for-profit college sector, so we wouldn't know. I guess this is the last question. So I guess my career path and your career path is kind of mirroring each other right now. I'm in a process of transitioning from the for-profit market to traditional college, and I'm finding it very, very difficult. At times I read some of the job descriptions and to the T, I do exact same thing. I send off my documents, I have these interviews, and nothing comes off them. I want to say that it's not done in my bad interview, but it's just, I don't know what's going on, and at times I feel like I'm defending myself for working for for-profit colleges when I'm talking to these, the hiring parties. So do you have any insight? What did you go to anything like that when you were transition in front of for-profit to traditional? You have any insight or anything that really helped me out to tell me to? Yeah. Yeah, you do have a tough road to hoe. I won't lie to you. That's the first thing I would do, right? I'm not gonna lie to you. I think that we do far too much of that lying and when we talk to folks and we obscure how important legitimacy and prestigious and higher education, and that mostly negatively impacts people who don't have traditional higher education backgrounds, right? If everybody lies to you and tells you that you can just work hard and it doesn't matter where you go, and I'm like, you gotta stop telling that lie. I know it makes us feel good about ourselves. That's really why we say it. Makes us feel less elitist, but it doesn't help the person we're talking to. So the first thing I would say is, the truth is you do, you do have a hard road to hoe. I mean, based on what we know in the research, employers seem to have developed, and the evidence, the literature there is I will admit scant. We don't have much on how employers make their labor market decisions, probably because they don't have much decision-making going on, but it's very hard to get access to them. But from what we do have, we have some audit studies of resumes, which is where we send out resumes with different types of degrees on them to see what employers' responses are to them. One of my favorites of these is out, I think this is Dorillo, et al's paper, that uses a fictitional degree even, as opposed to a for-profit degree, trying to see, can employers accurately discern what type of degree you have? Oh, and trying to come back? Yeah, I'm trying to traditional colleges. Yeah. So I do have a... Working at what level, may I ask? So I did the same thing you did, enrollments, admissions. I was the executive admissions of enrollments, the court on blue, a couple of months ago. So I'm trying to transition, trying to look for the BUs, the BCs, exactly, but for the, it's kind of hard. And like I said, it's like I'm trying to defend myself and I'm talking to these hard men sometimes, the fact that I used to work for a for-profit for the last several years. There's a lot of negative bias against what I call sector jumpers. I actually know, there's a group of us, about six of us, whenever I'm meeting anybody who has ever done it, we know each other, and we always say we need to do a conference. Just talking about our experiences and being on both sides of that sector, the truth is, you're gonna have to get another degree. Sorry, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's, why was I able to leave? I got a PhD from Annemarie. Yeah. And everybody else that I know who has ever done it will have the exact same experience, which leads me to believe there's something to that. So basically you are having to counter the negative bias, but they're not gonna trust you to counter it. They're gonna need some institutional prestige to counter it. Gotcha. We could be here all day with these questions. But I cannot, I've got to play. Thankfully, thankfully there's a book on sale for $24 that are gentlemen here from the CUN. Could you give them a round of applause, please? I will happily sign. Thank you, yes. Thanks, everybody.