20181223.0430

On 18 December 2018, Liz Teitz's "Closed College's Stranded Students Have Plenty of San Antonio Company" appeared in the online San Antonio Express-News. Opening with one affected student's story, the article reports on the recent deaccreditation and closure of Education Corporation of America schools, as well as other for-profit school closures and the difficulties students affected by those closures face as they try to balance discharging debts incurred and transfer of credits to other, hopefully more stable institutions. Other affected students' stories and comments illuminate the situation that many others face, and the article closes on a comment about the relative value of a potentially thwarted education.
The piece follows up on earlier comments Teitz made and which I discuss here. As I look back at the earlier piece and the current, I notice that the students quoted are all identified as female, and while it is likely as a function of the curricula taught at the now-lapsed Brightwood College, which seemed to focus on the feminized field of nursing, it is at odds with my experience teaching at for-profit schools. Those I've taught at have been more populated by male students than female, at least so far as I can tell, and I've taught in the putative service courses of the English composition sequence for the most part; those courses, per Timothy Carens's "Serpents in the Garden," serve as a microcosm for the schools as a whole, since they are among the few universally required courses (and the students at for-profit colleges are not typically those who have AP, CLEP, or dual-credit work to exempt them from sitting for them), so if I have perhaps one or two female students in a class of ten, then I have to expect that the enrollment in the school at large is similar.
But whether or not the reporting matches my experience, there is an implication in it, namely that it is largely women who are affected by the closures of for-profit colleges. And that has implications in turn. For for-profit colleges are typically attended by those who are obliged to defer their education--people like my mother, who is a graduate of such a school (long) after having attempted a degree while in the US Navy. She was, for several reasons that I'll not go into, obliged to set aside her education on her initial attempt and to defer a second attempt for what ended up being decades until she finally did find her way to a for-profit school, where she thrived. Conversations with my students suggest that the same is true for them; they had had to set aside their educations for some time, their reasons varying but their own. They have been and are members of less privileged populations, obliged to make choices that conduce to their further and ongoing de-privileging, and the malfeasance of the schools of last resort to which they turn serves only to keep them where they have been and where they are trying to leave.
When "the way you're supposed to do it" doesn't work, and through no fault of your own, you ought not to be blamed for looking for other ways. We are fortunate that more do not think to take more drastic measures than they have.