Jonathan Zimmerman
The College Dropout Scandal by David Kirp The Impoverishment of the American College Student by James V. Koch Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy
The College Dropout Scandal by David Kirp.
Oxford University Press,
175 pp., $24.95
The Impoverishment of the American College Student by James V. Koch. Brookings Institution,
271 pp., $24.99 (paper)
Lower Ed:
The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom. New Press, 228 pp.,
$18.99 (paper)
The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us by Paul Tough.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
390 pp., $28.00; $16.99 (paper)
Indebted:
How Families Make College Work at Any Cost by Caitlin Zaloom. Princeton University Press, 255 pp., $29.95
Every fall I begin my freshman seminar on higher education by asking students to guess how many colleges in the United States admit fewer than 20 percent of their applicants. Estimates range from several hundred to a thousand.
The correct answer is forty-six.1 These schools represent between 1 and 2 percent of the roughly three thousand four-year higher-education institutions in the country. But they include the colleges that I attended, as did my parents and my children; I imagine that many readers of these pages attended them as well. I would also wager that many of us went to college when we were around eighteen, lived on campus, majored in the arts and sciences rather than in preprofessional fields, and received our degrees in four years.
We’re the exception, not the rule. Of the roughly 70 percent of American high school graduates who enroll in college, 40 percent attend community college, which is almost never residential; more than a quarter of undergraduates 1Drew DeSilver, “A Majority of US Colleges Admit Most Students Who Apply,” Pew Research Center Fact Tank, April 9, 2019. are twenty-five or older; most major in business, the health sciences, or other preprofessional subjects; and they take an average of six years to complete college, if they finish it at all. Indeed, as David Kirp shows in The College Dropout Scandal, nearly 40 percent of undergraduates leave without a degree. Thirty-four million Americans—over a tenth of the nation’s population—have some college credits but dropped out before graduating. They are nearly twice as likely as college graduates to be unemployed and four times more likely to default on student loans.
That’s a scandal for the nation, not just for higher education. We like to imagine college as an egalitarian force, which reduces the gap between rich and poor. But over the past four decades it has mostly served to reinforce or even to widen that gap. During these years—and for the first time in American history—a college degree became the sine qua non of middle-class stability and self-sufficiency. Yet rising tuition and declining government assistance has put the degree out of reach for many Americans; others have had to borrow huge sums, saddling their families and futures with crippling debt.2
The coronavirus pandemic has compounded these inequalities and thrown them into sharper relief. Some lowincome students were stranded after their colleges closed, with no place to live and no way to leave; those who returned home often lacked computers, reliable Wi-Fi, or a quiet place to study when the colleges moved their classes online. If instruction remains online in the fall, even more students are likely to drop out. At this perilous juncture, we need to ask ourselves not just how we arrived here but also how we might see our way out.
America’s overall student debt burden recently topped $1.5 trillion, exceeding our collective debt on credit cards. Twenty-two percent of student loan borrowers are in default—that is, they have failed to make scheduled payments for an extended period of time— which is higher than the rate among
2See, for example, Michael Arceneaux’s I Don’t Want to Die Poor (Atria, 2020). homeowners. Student loan defaults are likely to increase even further now that the Trump administration has loosened restrictions on for-profit colleges, whose students have the highest default rate of all. Even when they do not default, people graduating with student loan debt are less likely to own homes, attend graduate school, or save for retirement; they’re also more likely to delay marriage and parenthood, as the economist and former college president James V. Koch writes in The Impoverishment of the American College Student.
The debt burden falls most heavily on people of color, especially women. Four out of five African-Americans graduate college with debt; on average they carry 70 percent more debt than white students do. That’s in part because they more often attend for-profit institutions. According to the calculations of the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom in her bracing study of the for-profits, Lower Ed, there were more low-income black and Hispanic women enrolled in for-profit institutions in 2008 than in four-year public and private nonprofit colleges combined. It makes sense for them to choose for-profit schools, which have stream