After today's class and reading Lareau piece ( follow up to UNequal childhoods) I could see how these for profit schools prey on these people with little formal or informal knowledge about college, those financially illiterate and unaccustomed to the college process.
To us, college students, it is common knowledge that state schools and community colleges are the cheaper and most accessible way to obtain a functional degree. These for profit schools create an illusion that working, career oriented people with families can benefits equally if not, more from these for profit private schools than any other because it is number one: affordable; which is an absolute fabrication. On that grounds alone, we can argue that these sales men in the "business" of education are taking advantage of uninformed communities. One can say, if these prospective students had just researched other options (state schools or CC's) they would know what was going on, but as we have seen from the program, information about college is not as accessible as we may think it is.
Many undeserved communities lack access to computers let alone internet which is the number tool of real schools when "recruiting" applicants; NOT television commercials as the for profit schools. Because the information from the for-profit school is the only one readily available, these people are wiling to take that information uncontested, because they simply do not know any better.
Challenging the admissions director would require cultural capital and knowledge about the institution of higher education that these communities simply do not have.
I completely agree with your response to this documentary and I would also like to add the way these colleges target low class students. One of the men from the documentary said state schools are now becoming only accessible for the middle and upper class, and the only option for low class students are these for-profits colleges, which I thought was completely giving the wrong message. Many state schools will provide financial aid, and aware a low income student does not have many resources, they will likely give substantial amount of gift aid. It is a lack of information these students are not receiving.
ReplyDeleteI agree with pretty much everything that you have said, except I think that those students were 'misinformed' rather than 'uninformed'. Most of those students should have heard of community colleges or state schools at some point in their lives. For example, in the video there is a girl, who wants to take a master program, have been pursued into being a doctor. Even a undergraduate student like her, who should know the system well enough, has fallen into the trap, and enrolled in a matter of days. She was either misled that these for-profit schools were actually better than other possible paths she could find, or as the video suggested, that some manipulation of her mind was involved. Things like 'keep them on the phone', 'find their weakness and dig into them' were found in the guide.
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