I spent about five years on the road talking to institutions, media, faculty, students about how tertiary “partners” like 2U brought the #LowerEd model into not-for-profit universities. I got tired. Money talks.
https://twitter.com/kevincarey1/status/1458425225029238786
I had to tell my own institution that I would not partner with third-party vendors to create online graduate degrees. Because I had, uh, written a book called Lower Ed.
In that work and across those travels I saw no appetite for understanding how this works. The arrogance of elite institutions where leadership seemed to really believe they were elite enough that data did not apply to them was a real lesson for me.
On the other side, there is no political interest in wrestling with institutions over the legitimacy of these programs. Graduate school debt explodes the last 15 years, especially for minority students, for the same reason massage therapy debt exploded.
Louise is correct in naming the fine-grained status distinctions at play here to sort and stratify quantitative data to reinforce and make anew those qualitative differences (see Healy and Fourcade).
I add that these distinctions are all about extraction. Massive transfers of public money to private profit through increasingly complex and narrow streams of extraction. A web of financialization extracts at the top and a web of status vouchering extracts from the bottom.
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