For-Profit Colleges Prey on Baltimore's Black Youth - The Atlantic

For-Profit Colleges Prey on Baltimore's Black Youth - The Atlantic:

When For-Profit Colleges Prey on Unsuspecting Students
Without access to counseling in high school, many ambitious yet disadvantaged students still end up in schools where they’re most likely to drop out and accrue lots of debt.

The most common image of Baltimore, Maryland’s largest city, is a place racked by crime, poverty, and despair—a perception largely fueled by the news mediaand popular television shows like The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. Now comes a research report that debunks the prevailing view of young people from Baltimore’s impoverished neighborhoods as “thugs” and “criminals.” It reveals a striking picture of black Baltimore youth striving, persevering, and working persistently to get ahead—only to find themselves undereducated and underemployed.

As part of a decade-long longitudinal ethnographic study that began in 2003, the sociologist Stefanie DeLuca closely followed the life course of 150 black youth growing up in Baltimore’s public-housing projects whose families participated in a federal housing experiment. Researchers wanted to gain a deeper understanding of these young people’s lives to investigate the notion that intergenerational poverty is unsolvable. But as the study wrapped up in 2013, with the youth on the brink of adulthood, an unexpected theme emerged with respect to their college experiences.

Looking for a quick path to steady work and income, these young adults were consistently drawn to for-profit trade schools. But what made this option appealing—a fast track to a new career—was also their downfall. Through in-depth interviews and fieldwork, the study’s findings offer a glimpse at what attracts disadvantaged youth to for-profit occupational programs and why they seldom complete certifications.

“Fewer than one out of five of the kids in our study ever turned to the street. These are young people who are trying to adhere to mainstream norms and values, and … their hard work still doesn't pay off,” said DeLuca, an associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of Coming of Age in the Other America, a book that resulted from her research. “The barriers are not just about four-year schools [but] at this other level, this newish part of the landscape … for-profit trade schools.”

Increasingly, for-profit schools have come under scrutiny from regulators and critics for leaving students—disproportionately black and Latino young adults—with heavy debts, poor graduation rates, and weak job prospects. Corinthian Colleges, one of the largest for-profit chains, closed its doors last year following a U.S. Education Department investigation and a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau lawsuit that charged the company with falsifying its job-placement rates. Last month, ITT Technical Institutes also shut down operations after 50 years in business, apparently buckling under “allegations of fraud, deceptive marketing and steering students into predatory loans,” as reported by The Washington Post.

In the Johns Hopkins study, most of the youth hailed from segregated Baltimore For-Profit Colleges Prey on Baltimore's Black Youth - The Atlantic: