Peter Laughner “Sylvia Plath”
The Men Behind the Curtain
As part of my doctoral research, I am conducting an institutional analysis of the growth of for-profit colleges. What about the mid 1990s made the environment so ripe for rapid expansion? Kevin Kinser gets at this neo-institutionally with a fine analysis of regulation and financialization.
Yet, there must something more than regulatory changes and market innovation to such a massive change in college-going in such a short period of time. Something created a million new people who suddenly wanted a college degree.
In my sample of currently enrolled for-profit students there is one motivation that subsumes all others: job insecurity.
“How “Admissions” Works Differently At For-Profit Colleges: Sorting and Signaling,” tressiemc22
I found this blog via Education and Class and it seems worth following. In the next several years I expect a lot of curtains to be drawn, revealing that the wizards behind the for-profit sector are simply salesmen with a flair for theater. Their main trick was a sexy dual appeal: first, to our sense of injustice– that great mass of people who have no access to a college education– and second, to our technological and consumer fetishes.
When I say “we” I mean those of us who study these things and are doing well financially. In Higher Education, that means the tenured and tenure track faculty, now a small minority of higher education teachers. We loved our technology, we had enough money at least to be early adopters, and we thought that these new communication technologies would help us reach people who had never been reached, much less heard. A great dream.
We are slowly learning to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain; I lost my bid for tenure. I am bothered by one thing, though. As people have said in many contexts, the recent story of higher education, or, rather, the historians, tend to ignore the teachers when they tell the story of the system and the students. This isn’t just a story about students and new institutions and class, it is also a story about creating the adjunct system.
Bad for Students, Good for Wall Street
What’s bad for students has been good for Wall Street. The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that “Student-Loan Securities Stay Hot” even as student default rates climb. “Demand for the riskiest bunch” of student-loan backed securities sold last week by SLM Corp, formerly known as Sallie Mae, “was 15 times greater than the supply.” The riskiest securities have the highest yields, but investors don’t have to care, given the special impossibility of defaulting or erasing student loan debt. Meanwhile, the New York Fed reports that 90-day delinquency rates have risen from 24 to 31 percent since 2008, and that student debt nearly tripled in the last eight years. When the Fed breaks out the numbers for Intern Nation–graduates of the past eight years–they found that “the delinquency rate jumped to 35% last quarter from 26% in 2008.”
“The Current Cost Debate Will Do Nothing Except Hurt Students,” Remaking the University
The beauty of capitalism is that it can make money out of anything. The horror of capitalism is that it can make money out of anything. The student debt bubble won’t become a problem until the default rate begins to threaten the solvency of a few large banks, just as the housing bubble wasn’t a problem until it threatened the solvency of a few huge banks. Meanwhile, tuition continues to rise and the speculators keep the betting tables lively.
Arlissa: Sticks and Stones