Up to 90% of the revenue for-profit colleges generate every year comes from the Federal Student Aid system. That is all tax-supported money, just like the money flowing to your state college. That means we are invested in ITT, DeVry, Everest - whether we go there or not. And the debt, and the experiences students have when they attend these schools are not just a problem for individual students, they're a problem for all of us because we helped create it.

Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom explains how for-profit colleges cashed in on inequality in our new, financialized economy - from the industry's false promises of mobility in a time of increased precarity, to the government policies making schools too big to fail, while leaving students in debt, and society supporting another newly predatory capitalist endeavor.

Tressie is author of the book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy from The New Press.

Interview transcript via Antidote Zine