Last week I asked you all to vote for the next reading in our online book club. After some good discussion and 88 votes, the selection was clear:
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. (publisher; Amazon)
This critical look at how the for-profit higher education sector boomed and took advantage of many Americans clearly appeals to you, and is definitely a major education book for 2017. It may point us to what comes next, especially if Trump tries to restart the for-profit edu industry.
Later this week I’ll post a reading schedule and links to materials. For now, grab yourself a copy.
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.
I also want to thank the many commentators and voters. Some offered additional titles beyond those in the poll, and I’ve added a bunch to our next reading survey.
Stay tuned for the schedule post, and happy reading.
Reblogged this on As the Adjunctiverse Turns and commented:
ICYMI (and even if you haven’t), join us at the book club /reading group cross platform free-for-all to read and talk about Lower Ed
Sigh.
This is not reading. This is studying.
If any of you ever retire, you’ll understand the difference.
*IF* is a pretty huge word.
I bought this book after hearing Cottom on NPR. I put it down only because I’ve got so many other irons in the fire. I’m happy that I now have a group that I can commit to because I really do think this is an important book.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
there’s a really excellent episode of The Good Wife about a student suing a for-profit college in Chicago: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/03/good-wife-tackles-profit-colleges-and-student-debt
Good one, Jaci! I haven’t seen the show, so this is very useful.
Tressie has a series of #LowerEd blog posts about researching, methods, writing etc, https://tressiemc.com/tag/lowered/
Good one, Vanessa. Thank you.
Read the Intro this weekend as I ended up purchasing since ILL let me down! I think this will be a very good experience for me as I truly have not thought deeply about the For Profits. I have not “dived into” nor really examined the multiple ways to examine this in terms of admission, retention, $ to students, etc.
Oh good.
Schedule post coming up.
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