On to our next book club reading! The discussion and voting pointed to Tressie McMillan Cottom‘s Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. (publisher; Amazon). In this post I’ll outline a proposed reading schedule.
Let’s start reading on May 8th. That should give us time to lay our hands on copies.*
Each chapter is under thirty pages, so if we assign ourselves one per seek, we get:
May 8 – Introduction: The Education Gospel
May 15 – Chapter 1. The Real.
May 22 – Chapter 2. The Beauty College and the Technical College.
May 29 – Chapter 3. Jesus Is My Backup Plan.
June 5 – Chapter 4. When Higher Education Makes Cents.
June 12 – Chapter 5. Where Credit Is Due.
June 19 – Chapter 6. Credentials, Jobs, and the New Economy.
June 26 – Epilogue and Methodological Notes
How does that sound? Unless people desire a different timeline, I’m ready to blog about each chapter on those Mondays.
Readings and resources:
- A Wisconsin Public Radio interview with Cottom.
- A Have You Heard? podcast interview with Cottom. (thanks to Jennifer Berkshire for reaching out to me)
- Posts tagged “Lower Ed” on Cottom’s site. (thanks to blog commentator Vanessa Vaile)
- An episode of The Good Wife about a student suing a for-profit. (thanks to blog commentator Jaci Paige)
- Students who see themselves as having had good experiences at for-profits
If you’re new to our book club… welcome! The way it works is I post about selections (circa one chapter) every week. Each post is assigned a tag, https://bryanalexander.org/tag/lower-ed/, so you can easily work back through them. Read on your own pace. You can share thoughts by comments on each post and/or on Twitter (hashtag LowerEd) and/or your own posts on a blog, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. People have also sometimes made stuff elsewhere, like Google Docs, Hypothes.is annotations, web apps (really), and hosted images. This is a distributed book club; please participate as you see fit. For examples of our earlier discussions, head to the book club page.
*Print copies. As far as I can tell the ebook version is what Amazon calls “a print replica”, meaning it consists of a series of static images. No word search, no way to alter font size. I’ve written to the publisher to complain, and they have yet to respond as of this writing. So get a print copy.
(thanks to Trent Hergenrader for help)
for once I have the book before the sessions start — and, even better, vision for reading recent cataract surgery/ Blog commentator? Sounds like blogging version of a dental assistance. Just call me a guerrilla informationist (collect, sift, distribute) without portfolio or affiliations — at least until/unless I come up with something I like better.
With 16 Lower Ed and related links in this collection, it’s time to start another bundle. Tip: search “for-profit” on Tressie’s blog ~ she’s been blogging the topic long before writing the book.
PS I really need to get in the habit of copy editing before pushing the post button: “vision for reading due to recent cataract surgery” and “dental assistant”
Reblogged this on As the Adjunctiverse Turns and commented:
Here’s Bryan Alexander’s plan for the Lower Ed book club reading sessions, making cyber landfall starting Monday May 8 with the Introduction.
Might want to find out how she feels about online annotation. Some folks can’t handle it. I suspect she can, but would be good to know.
I just did a quick check and it looks like the book from Google Play is searchable (this is checking the free sample which is part of Chapter 1.) I may buy from there but I’ve made a request for a library copy.
My local public library had it available through the Hoopla digital service, which does provide a properly-formatted ebook.
Good!
I think the publisher is changing this up.
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Just got the book from the library–will plunge in this week.
Oh good.
What’s your favorite place to share thoughts?
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