Our next reading: Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy

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:

Cottom, Lower Ed (cover)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.

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12 Responses to Our next reading: Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy

  1. VanessaVaile says:

    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

  2. Sigh.
    This is not reading. This is studying.
    If any of you ever retire, you’ll understand the difference.

  3. 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.

  4. Jaci Paige says:

    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

  5. VanessaVaile says:

    Tressie has a series of #LowerEd blog posts about researching, methods, writing etc, https://tressiemc.com/tag/lowered/

  6. Vicky Romano says:

    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.

  7. Pingback: Reading _Lower Ed_: the plan | Bryan Alexander

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