Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. In the end, Cottom suggests, by their very existence, with reassuringly august names like the University of Phoenix and ITT Technical Institute (and, perhaps most notoriously, Trump University), these schools, which are often publicly subsidized to some extent, are “an indicator of social and economic inequalities and, at the same time, are perpetuators of those inequalities.”Ĭottom does a good job of making the name “Lower Ed” stick, and she makes a solid case for reviewing the entire system of higher education for openness of opportunity.Īmerican schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. “Traditional colleges,” she writes, “benefit from a deeply entrenched cultural faith in the value of college, particularly among higher-status groups.” For the lower-status and the aspirational, college is a way of getting one’s ticket punched, to get a credential that might lead somewhere better. However, writes Cottom, another factor is that most of these students, ill-educated to begin with, simply have no preparation in navigating bureaucracies and no way of gauging the difference between one school and the next, down to knowing what the cost might be. What drives this preyed-upon class, whose members, the author rightly adds, are not necessarily academically inferior? In part, perhaps, the promise of a degree more easily attained than at a regular academic institution. The unknown number of for-profit students-variously said to be between 1.2 million and about twice that many enrollees-pays about 20 percent more than at a “flagship public university” for an undergraduate degree but about four times more than an associate’s degree at a community college. In this slender book, she lays out a case against a system that engenders predation and that profits, in the end, from social and economic injustice. An informal sociological study of diploma mills and their often ripped-off discontents.īefore becoming a sociology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, sometime Slate columnist Cottom worked at a for-profit college whose machinations she came, once understanding them, to despise.
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