Introduction

This edited volume proposes that the phenomenon of private sector, financialized higher education expansion in the United States benefits from a range of theoretical and methodological treatments. Social scientists, policy analysts, researchers, and for-profit sector leaders discuss how and to what ends for-profit colleges are a functional social good.

Key Themes

The chapters include discussions of inequality, stratification, and legitimacy, differing greatly from other work on for-profit colleges in three ways:

• First, this volume moves beyond rational choice explanations of for-profit expansion to include critical theoretical work.
• Second, it deals with the nuances of race, class, and gender in ways absent from other research.
• Finally, the book's interdisciplinary focus is uniquely equipped to deal with the complexity of high-cost, low-status, for-profit credentialism at a scale never before seen.