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...

"America's higher education system is failing its students. In the space of a generation, we have gone from being the best-educated society in the world to one in which a college degree benefits only to those in the top income brackets. In Degrees of Inequality, acclaimed political scientist Suzanne Mettler explains why the system has gone so horribly wrong and why the American Dream is increasingly out of reach for so many. In her eye-opening account,...

One of the most sustained and vigorous public debates today is about the value and, crucially, the price of college. But an unspoken, outdated assumption underlies all sides of this debate: if a young person works hard enough, they'll be able to get a college degree and be on the path to a good life. That's simply not true anymore, says Sara Goldrick-Rab. Quite simply, college is far too expensive for many people today, and the confusing mix of federal,...