Union organizing is extremely important not because it directly impacts higher education, but it affords workers different and better choices. And when workers feel less insecure in their labor arrangements they are much less likely to take on a high risk credential.

TANF (which was created during the Welfare Reform Act of 1996) lead to an expansion in for-profit colleges that don’t provide the education that people need and put them into debt they can’t get out of?

That’s what workers are feeling, and they’re feeling it at the same time that wages have stagnated, so they have less money to pay for anything, the costs of things like healthcare (which in the short term can seem a little bit more critical than education), and things like taking care of elderly parents and navigating the inevitable cost of living life. Workers are feeling that, and they are angry. And they should be angry. Because our politicians and our political system has not done a good job of protecting us against those changes.

You would think so, except for how one of the consequences of the typical American worker becoming more efficient (which we have become, mostly through developments in technology) is that employers no longer have to rely on the workers’ development of skills to keep them efficient. Workers have become more expendable than they were thirty or forty years ago. If the worker is more expendable, we don’t need to worry about developing their skill set. We need the technology, and we need to train the workers on how to manage that technology on the ground in real time, but we don’t need to develop in our workers the capacity (for example) to develop new technology.

They say things like, “This wonderful trend is happening in the United States: we have produced more high school graduates, but because of how we have produced them—through unequal K-12 schools—fewer people are qualified to go to college. And isn’t that great for us? There are people who have graduated from high school who aren’t prepared for college. That’s wonderful. We can enroll those people. That means we’re a good economic investment for you, the potential investor.”

That’s one of the things that I hope my work does, is shift the conversation away from everybody in these schools being predators preying on vulnerable students. The more disturbing story is the truth, which is that even when the people in these institutions think they’re doing a good thing, because of the way the institutions are set up, they are still preying on people.

What they say at for-profit colleges is, “We will only train you for a job, because that’s what matters.” When you say that, though, we have a really concrete way of measuring whether or not you are delivering on what you promised. Do you get your students that job you promised them? That’s the problem that for-profit colleges have. We have a really clear way to measure if they are successful or not.

I think so. The promises are lofty, no matter where you go. Traditional not-for-profit education promises all kinds of things. “We’ll change your whole life! We will teach you how to be an informed, critical-thinking citizen!” Whether we always manage that depends on who you ask and what data that you like. But with for-profit colleges, the real problem is the nature of the promise that they make. It’s just as lofty, but it’s also more concrete.

So your question, Chuck, was how we know that people know what they know.

This is one of the really brilliant moves that the for-profit college sector has done, the sleight of hand of saying “customer” instead of “student.” We understand a “student” as someone we’re all collectively responsible for. We’re responsible for the health, well-being, and development of students. We think of “customers,” however, as being on their own. Buyer beware. And if you make a poor decision, hey, customers have to learn.

There is no for-profit college sector without access to federal student aid money.

It’s another way that we haven’t managed the problem well—but I won’t say that accreditation is the issue. Accreditation is a really weird thing. People who bring it up don’t always really know how accreditation works. When we say a school is or should not be accredited, we generally mean: is it a good school? Is it high quality? And that’s a little different from what accreditation does in practice.

would say, “All colleges are for-profit.” What makes the place where you worked, Technical College, or University of Phoenix, different from Harvard or Northwestern? TM: I hear that one all the time. I now actually tell people: “I promise you I’ve heard that joke. You don’t have to do that one for me anymore.” All schools are for-profit. I get it, I do.

Because that shift happened, and because of our belief that the way to address the problem was to provide more market opportunities instead of more public social safety supports, it was a perfect opportunity for profiteering from the for-profit colleges.

“new economy”

the secretarial school

but you point out that for-profit colleges have been around for two hundred years

Thank you so much, Chuck, for welcoming me to hell.

printed with permission. Edited for space and readability.

Transcribed from the 11 March 2017 episode of This is Hell! Radio (Chicago