At first, I was confused by the terminology “For-Profit Colleges”, so naturally I looked up what that was on Google. Before clicking enter on any of the searches, I noticed an interesting correlation between all of the most searched topics revolving around For-Profit Colleges. There was a very negative connotation — all of the suggested searches said things like: “For-Profit Colleges Horror Stories/Scam/Bad/Lawsuits/Closing”. Well, with that in mind, I read this article through a particular lens, mainly in a pessimistic way.
Initially, I thought Tressie McMillan was going entirely for a feel-good story with this person named James, but I think through James, Tressie learned more about issues of For-Profit Colleges. She was trying to do her job as a recruiter when it kept seeming more and more unethical. McMillan obviously knew what she was doing, but eventually the realization hit her. This school she was recruiting for wasn’t interested in education, but rather the sheer number of students they could reel in and make money off of. For each student they could get to commit, not only were they making money off tuition, but Federal Funding as well. McMillan wanted to help students, and get them on the right path, while her superiors wanted to use the students as a finite resource to secure money in their pockets. This drove McMillan to research the ideologies behind For-Profit colleges.
McMillan dug deeper into the situation. She looked at socio-economic statuses and their relation to the pursuit of higher education. She found that these colleges were presenting an opportunity, but at what cost. Students were getting admitted, but they weren’t receiving a fair education. This all relates to these students having four characteristics that fluctuate the For-Profit colleges’ agendas. McMillan pin-pointed that these students have four distinct relationships that underpin their social contracts, which in turn make acquiring fair higher education more difficult. These four characteristics are job mobility, labor flexibility, declining internal labor markets, and the risk shift. These economic characteristics put a lot more pressure on students who are already financially struggling. After diving into this, McMillan has been in search of an answer to benefit those who have attended For-Profit colleges.
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