Why is Higher Education Inaccessible for Most Americans?
Written in 2015 and still well grounded in 2021, Hannah Appel and Astra Taylor, students of City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies, refer to college as a sort of industry, one that specifically targets low-income students and single mothers as “ideal customers.” The authors continue their metaphor on the “college industry” and how it sells tickets to the American Dream in which the low-income buyer receives a middle-class life in return, trick free (or so the industry wants you to believe). Over the last 30 years, the tuition for college in the United States of America has increased by approximately 1,200 percent. College or University, often associated with the idea of high class and or upward mobility, hides the ugly truth of wealth disparity. With student loan debt quadrupling from 2003 to 2013, Appel and Taylor beg to ask, what college does and for whom does it do it for? The duo takes issue with for-profit institutions, stating“Much of the American public does not understand the difference between for-profit, public, and private non-profit institutions of higher learning. All three are concerned with generating revenue, but only the for-profit model exists primarily to enrich its owners. The largest of these institutions are often publicly traded, nationally franchised corporations legally beholden to maximize profit for their shareholders before maximizing education for their students. While commercial vocational programs have existed since the nineteenth century, for-profit colleges in their current form are a relatively new phenomenon that began to boom with a series of initial public offerings in the 1990s, followed quickly by deregulation of the sector as the millennium approached. The Bush administration legislation then weakened government oversight of such schools, while expanding their access to federal financial aid, making the industry irresistible to Wall Street investors.” (Appel and Taylor) Likewise, Appel and Taylor add: “While the for-profit business model has generally served investors well, it has failed students. Retention rates are abysmal and tuitions sky-high. For-profit colleges can be up to twice as expensive as Ivy League universities and routinely cost five or six times the price of a community college education. The Medical Assistant program at for-profit Heald College in Fresno, California costs $22,275. A comparable program at Fresno City College costs $1,650. An associate degree in paralegal studies at Everest College in Ontario, California costs $41,149, compared with $2,392 for the same degree at Santa Ana College, a mere thirty-minute drive away.” The authors demonstrate that while there are means to achieving the American Dream by way of higher education, lack of research or just plain confusion can lead low-income students down a never ending cycle of debt for years to come without an end in sight. The ideology that college or university is a way to “get out” of poverty and create a successful life with a beneficial career needs to be uprooted and disbanded indefinitely. It is absurd to create the notion that A) all students who want to are able to attend college or university and B) are able to do so without total and utter financial grapple to stay remotely afloat. Not to mention, the authors find that “Graduates of for-profit schools generally do not fare so well. Indeed, they rarely find them-selves (sic) in the kind of work they were promised when they enrolled, the kind of work that might enable them to repay their debts, let alone purchase the commodity cornerstones of the American dream (sic) like a car or a home,”
