Lower Ed - by Tressie McMillan Cottom

About the Book

Drawing on her personal experience as a former admissions counselor at two for-profit colleges and interviews with students, senior executives, and activists, Cottom explains the exorbitant price tags, the questionable credentials, and the lose-lose options for Americans seeking a better life.

Book Synopsis

"The best book yet on the complex lives and choices of for-profit students."
--The New York Times Book Review

As featured on The Daily Show, NPR's Marketplace, and Fresh Air, the "powerful, chilling tale" (Carol Anderson, author of White Rage) of higher education becoming an engine of social inequality Lower Ed is quickly becoming the definitive book on the fastest-growing sector of higher education at the turn of the twenty-first century: for-profit colleges. With sharp insight and deliberate acumen, Tressie McMillan Cottom--a sociologist who was once a recruiter at two for-profit colleges--expertly parses the fraught dynamics of this big-money industry.

Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with students, employees, executives, and activists, Lower Ed details the benefits, pitfalls, and real costs of the expansion of for-profit colleges. Now with a new foreword by Stephanie Kelton, economic advisor to Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign, this smart and essential book cuts to the very core of our nation's broken social contracts and the challenges we face in our divided, unequal society.

Review Quotes

Praise for Lower Ed:
"The best book yet on the complex lives and choices of for-profit students."
--The New York Times Book Review "[A] bracing study of the for-profits."
--The New York Review of Books

"Cottom does a good job of making the name Lower Ed stick, and she makes a solid case for reviewing the entire system of higher education for openness of opportunity."
--Kirkus Reviews

"In Lower Ed McMillan Cottom is at her very best--rigorous, incisive, empathetic, and witty. . . . Her sharp intelligence, throughout, makes this book compelling, unforgettable, and deeply necessary."
--Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women and Bad Feminist

"Lower Ed is brilliant. It is nuanced, carefully argued, and engagingly written. It is a powerful, chilling tale of what happens when profit-driven privatization of a public good latches on to systemic inequality and individual aspirations."
--Carol Anderson, author of White Rage and professor of African American studies at Emory University

"This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the market forces currently transforming higher education. It is an eye-opening portrait of this burgeoning educational sector and the ways in which its rapid expansion is linked to skyrocketing inequality and growing labor precarity in the twenty-first-century United States."
--Ruth Milkman, past president of the American Sociological Association

"In a sea of simplistic and often bombastic critiques of American higher education, Tressie McMillan Cottom's trenchant analysis of Lower Ed stands out. As the Trump administration moves to make life ever easier for the nation's for-profit colleges, this book offers the most powerful form of resistance--detailed storytelling of the causes and consequences of this big-money industry. Anyone frustrated with high college prices, student debt, or the diminishing sense of hope surrounding so many communities needs to read this book."
--Sara Goldrick-Rab, author of Paying the Price and professor of higher education policy at Temple University

"With passion, eloquence, and data too, McMillan Cottom charts the harm we are doing to our youth, to higher education, and to democracy itself."
--Cathy N. Davidson, author of Now You See It and founding director of the Futures Initiative at the City University of New York

"[A] profound examination of the role of for-profit colleges in the emerging, 'new' American economic landscape. This is the best book I've read on for-profit (or shareholder) colleges and universities."
--William A. Darity Jr., professor of economics, public policy, and African American studies at Duke University

About the Author

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of Thick. Her work has been featured by The Daily Show, the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS, NPR, Fresh Air, and The Atlantic, among others. In 2020, McMillan Cottom was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.