Source: NPR
Tressie McMillan Cottom, a former enrollment officer at two for-profit colleges, discusses in her new book the ways in which for-profits often exploit racial, gender and economic inequality.
She discusses the tendency of for-profit schools to recruit students who will pay the most and who seek the most aid, since the institutions are funded by tuition. This often results in targeting poor students – usually women of color, she explains.
The financial burden is drastically larger for students attending for-profit colleges, with credentials costing 30 to 40 percent more than an education from a nonprofit higher education institution.
The process of getting reeled in to a private institution, furthermore, can be very aggressive for students, with recruiters calling potential candidates, collecting private information, and enrolling them into programs, all within a few weeks.
In recent years, “for-profit colleges have faced federal funding and state investigations…for their aggressive recruiting tactics,” reported NPR.
The result is that students who truly cannot afford the expensive education and who drop out of college end up with a debt too large to ever repay, and might end up never returning to graduate.
Read full story: NPR