Work & Education
Toniann German
Soc Ass. #6
This week’s readings related to one another in that they are discussing the relationship between work and education. “Raising the Floor Not just the Ceiling” discusses author Tressie Cottom rebutting against president Barack Obama’s thoughts that for-profit colleges will aid in making education more accessible to the minority population. In this article, Cottom explains that it is not allowing people the same opportunity to become educated, rather than allowing people the same opportunities to earn a wage. Just because someone goes to college does not grantee them a job or the same pay as some of today’s “white workers.” Because there is no federal job guarantee we see Obamas example of how low income kids who have the grades to go to great colleges refuse or settle for less. I believe this is because we are stuck in a world were a degree is required for better pay and yet we “still fall through the cracks of the American Dream.” (Cottom,2014) Cottom is arguing that we must make it fair for those who do not believe in attending college. The “solution that leads to a bigger problem” that Cottom was describing was making college more available by stating that college allows for better opportunity or better pay, when in reality people will be more in debt and unhappy that they had to attend college to work in a field where there is still an unfairness in wage and job opportunities for minorities.
Pual Fains article also backs up Cottom in that for- profit colleges do not truly have the students’ needs at heart. In the “Congressional report slams for-profit colleges” Author Paul Fain states that students who attend for profit colleges are failing. A two-year study showed that associate degree students have a 64% drop out rate. He states that there is in fact a connection from the dropout rates to the amount of money that is used on the student’s education. He argues that most of the money is going to the advertisements for the school rather than helping their students graduate. For profit colleges are supposed to be an alternative for nontraditional students such as day time working adults, however studies show that these colleges are more concerned with gaining money from enrolling students and profiting from their debt.
This connects to “Andrew Ross article High culture and hard labor” in that, for-profit colleges are using their resources to exploit their students rather than provide for them. In Ross article, he discusses how wealthy parts of Abu Dhabi and as well as Dubi are exploiting migrant workers due to their ethnicity and lack of education by having them creating luxury buildings under threat. Ross explains the fast pace construction from the workers on Saadiyat island have many concerned. After interviewing some of the workers who had been promised decent pay and their recruitment fees paid in full from their employers Ross has discovered that what is written on paper is not in fact true. Most of the workers have had their passports taken away, their homes relocated and downgraded to labor camps, and have not been paid what they were promised. This is in fact occurring on some level here in the states were for profit colleges are not truly helping or providing for their students leaving them in debt and uneducated, there for leaving them open to desperation and unfair wage such as the workers in ross’s article.
