Lowering the Basement Floor: From Community Colleges to the For-Profit Revolution

Abstract

For-profit colleges have become a major force in higher education. They claim to offer a career-oriented practical education that is an alternative to community and four-year colleges. Often they fail to provide what they promise. Rather than being a new alternative, for-profits are the new basement floor of education, offering substandard educations at inflated prices. The primacy of profit motives and especially financialization means that for-profits are more like a financial instrument of neoliberal policies than educational institutions. Fueled by the reliance on federal student loans for operations expenses, educational aims are secondary to advertising and recruitment of a continuing supply of students without much regard for graduation rates. They appeal to first-generation students and recent immigrants with little information about higher education or the job market.