Episode 02: Lower Ed

The rise of for-profit colleges, and President Trump’s speech to Congress. Plus, the return of general strikes and a woman whose husband died because there was no Obamacare. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week, President Trump delivered a joint address to Congress, promising to ring in a “new era of greatness.” But he forgot to mention the $54 billion in cuts he’s seeking to programs that serve low- and middle-income Americans. Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities joins to unpack what Trump said — and didn’t say. Next up, Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Lower-Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, joins the show. Bryce Covert of ThinkProgress talks about the return of general strikes, and finally Sarah Borgstede, a woman whose husband’s life would have been saved if the Affordable Care Act had been in place, shares her family’s story. But first, Jeremy Slevin returns with this week’s news in poverty and inequality.

This week’s guests:

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Virginia Commonwealth University
Jared Bernstein, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Bryce Covert, ThinkProgress
Sarah Borgstede, RESULTS

For more on this week’s topics…

Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy in its entirety.
A history of the general strike — and its return.
Sarah Borgstede’s heart-wrenching story, in writing.

This program was released on March 2, 2017.

Transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. This week, Trump gave his first joint address to congress, promising to ring in a new era of greatness, his words, not mine. But he forgot to mention the $54 billion dollars in cuts that he’s seeking to programs that serve low and middle income Americans. Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities joins me to unpack what Trump said and what he didn’t say. Next I’m joined by Tressie McMillan Cottom. She’s the author of “Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For Profit Colleges in the New Economy.” And Bryce Covert of ThinkProgress who joins to discuss the general strike. And finally, a woman whose husband’s life would’ve been saved if the Affordable Care Act had been in place. But first, Jeremy Slevin returns with what we might have missed this week in poverty, inequality and resistance. Slevs.

JEREMY SLEVIN: What you might have missed.

VALLAS: Well I want to give our listeners some credit.

SLEVIN: Just in case. In case you missed it.

VALLAS: In case you missed it, we have some stuff to talk about.

SLEVIN: OK. So, in case you missed it, the Kansas Supreme Court on Thursday, they just ruled that the state’s funding of public education is so low that it’s unconstitutional. And this is after the governor, Republican Governor Sam Brownback has passed tax cut after tax cut, including a massive one that eliminated all business tax cuts in 2013, and they’re now in a giant budget hole of $350 million dollars or something, which is huge in Kansas size.

VALLAS: Because of tax cuts to the wealthy.

SLEVIN: Because of massive tax cuts and they’re trying to now retroactively pay for those tax cuts by cutting education. And the supreme court said basically no, all of these cuts would fall largely on low income people who have much lower education funding already and this is unconstitutional.

VALLAS: So interesting to watch not just at the state level because of what this means for the fights that we’re waging currently and about to really be in the middle of at the federal level as well if Republicans get what they are wishing for when it comes to tax cuts.

SLEVIN: Right. Well, this is what happens when you cut taxes mainly on the wealthy, someone has to pay for it on the backend.

VALLAS: So now, you started with bad news and I feel like I should’ve led, because last week you promised to come with good news.

SLEVIN: OK, I have some.

VALLAS: You promised to improve your search terms so that instead of googling “good news this week” you would find something that actually works.

SLEVIN: Yes. I would google that before I came into the studio.

VALLAS: Instead of on the air.

SLEVIN: Instead of on the air.

VALLAS: So did you find any good news?

SLEVIN: Yes, I found some good news. I learned that you have to look in blue states in this case and we can say that now because we’re c(4).

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: So what did you find?

SLEVIN: So California, there’s some really hopeful and possibly good news. So California just introduced a Medicare for all, single payer health plan. I butched those words.

VALLAS: We knew what you meant.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: Health plan. So that would not only lower costs of health care but it would obviously insure everyone in the state. And the silver lining of this —

VALLAS: The whole thing is a silver lining.

SLEVIN: But the weird thing is that if Trump turned Medicaid over to the states, which would actually be really bad in a lot of cases, because it would kick more people off Medicaid down the road. But it would allow states to use that funding to implement their own Medicaid for all, or Medicare for all health plans.

VALLAS: Oh, that’s fascinating. So definitely need to be watching at the state level what’s going on with health care. Not just because of potentially awful stuff like refusal to expand Medicaid and now roll back potentially block grants which we’ve started to talk about on the show and we’ll talk more about later this episode and in the future. But also potentially some good stuff.

SLEVIN: Yeah. And well, it also illustrates that if everything is turned over to the states, you could have something really good like Medicare for all in California and at the same time you can have a Kansas, who hasn’t expanded Medicaid and it has a giant budget hole. So, on balance I think we’d rather have people have Medicaid coverage than states experiment.

VALLAS: So, any other good news?

SLEVIN: Yeah, some good news. At the federal level actually. So there was a big rally on Capitol Hill yesterday which, mostly Democratic legislators, calling for an increase, a raise for federal workers. This comes after Trump instituted a hiring freeze on federal workers, which will actually end up costing more because you’re going to have to do the work somehow and contract it out. But they’re calling for a 3.2 percent raise for federal workers which would at least make sure the people who currently have jobs are paid a fair amount.

VALLAS: Well, exciting to watch as well, and they’re calling that the FAIR Act, the Federal Adjustment of Income Rates Act.

SLEVIN: Gotta love those legislation acronyms.

VALLAS: I mean, I know, I know. [LAUGHTER] But I have to say usually democrats aren’t as good at coming up with these, frankly.

SLEVIN: That’s true. Well, we’re going to change that. [LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Well I guess we are, we’re going to need to. So quickly there’s news also on the climate front.

SLEVIN: Yeah. I don’t know if this is good, bad, it’s just kind of facepalm news.

VALLAS: Facepalm news, the third category.

SLEVIN: It’s kind of encouraging. Darrell Issa just joined the climate change caucus. Darrell Issa, of course, was former House Oversight Republican chair.

VALLAS: And a long time denier of climate change.

SLEVIN: Long, so yeah, there’s the kicker. He has spent his career denying the science of climate change. Saying that there’s a wide range of scientific opinion and the scientific community does not agree. So I guess it’s good news that he’s now joining the climate change caucus.

VALLAS: Well, do we, are we sure that he knows what it is and that he didn’t get confused that it was like a climate denial caucus?

SLEVIN: He thought it was global cooling or whatever, yeah.

VALLAS: Yeah.

SLEVIN: Well he’s facing a tough re-election. Some have said he’s really vulnerable. So that’s why.

VALLAS: So maybe he’s starting to feel the heat.

SLEVIN: Yeah. He saw the light so he’s feeling the heat, is that what they say?

VALLAS: Enough puns. So, if that’s even possible. And then let’s, I wanted to close and this was actually your idea, not mine. So I’m going to give you credit where credit is due. But we wanted to close with some stories to help put a face on the ICE detentions that have been happening as a result of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrant communities. Help us put a face, who are these folks who are being caught up?

SLEVIN: Yeah. You may have seen out there that there are these just awful stories. Some of them are green card holders, some of them are people with no criminal records whatsoever, which violates Trump’s promise to only deport criminals. So, one, Joel Guerrero, this week was detained. He is a green card holder. His only crime was a misdemeanor charge for marijuana possession over a decade ago, which he says he had a marijuana plant in his backyard. He’s expecting a kid. He’s married. He’s lived in the country for two decades. His family wasn’t even told he was being deported. He sent a text message as it was happening. And was then forced to turn over his shoelaces, belt, and wedding band to his wife. It is currently being appealed. A lawyer that he obtained filed an emergency motion to stay the deportation.

VALLAS: And you have two others as well.

SLEVIN: Yeah, so Juan Carlos Fompersoa Garcia, he’s a 44 year old construction worker. He has not committed any crime. He has a work permit, he was seeking asylum. He’s a full time worker, there’s no crime. He also has a family, a 17 year old son and they were waiting for him to come home for dinner and he never came home, that’s how they found out. Last one, which I think is getting a lot of attention today is Jose Escobar who is a father living in Houston, Texas. He, the only reason he’s being deported is because of a paperwork gaffe when he was a kid. He’s lived here almost his whole life. His mother forgot to include his name on her renewal applications because she thought he would be automatically included and now he’s expected to be deported to El Salvador. He hasn’t lived there for 16 years.

VALLAS: So the people that Trump is calling criminals, but who are really families being torn apart by these hateful and divisive policies. Slevs, thank you for joining us and for helping us with what we missed or didn’t miss, and now we hopefully haven’t missed it at all. Don’t go away, next up Jared Bernstein helps me unpack Trump’s speech. What he said, what he didn’t say and what it means for workers and families in this country.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. In his joint address to congress, President Trump promised a new chapter of American greatness. But underneath the rhetoric his speech was rife with falsehoods, contradictions and some pretty terrifying policies. Here to help us unpack what he said and what he didn’t say is Jared Bernstein. He’s a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economist for Vice President Biden. Jared, thanks so much for joining Off-Kilter.

JARED BERNSTEIN: Thank you for inviting me on.

VALLAS: So just to sort of think back to some of the stuff that Trump said. It’s hard not to start with a number. $54 billion dollars, and that is the amount in cuts that he is effectively promising to investments that are critical for low income and middle class families. But that’s certainly not how he sold it. So what is it that we heard him say and what does it tell us about what we should be expecting when it comes to his budget?

BERNSTEIN: So the number you’re talking about is his proposal to increase defense spending. And that actually takes defense spending to where it was before congress put these caps on, that is these limits on what the Congress can allocate for defense and for non-defense. And the problem is, it’s not just that he’s breaking through these caps, I don’t really care all that much about that. I think the problem is that he plans to pay for that extra money for defense but cutting non-defense discretionary parts of the budget. Now that sounds very obscure. But let me tell you, that this has to do with Head Start programs, child care programs, aid for poor school districts, job creating Pell Grants so that low income students can afford college. Low income rental assistance, programs that push back on homelessness and many others. And that’s just for his defense department plus up. I think it’s a good question as to whether defense needs another $54 billion, but I can tell you for sure that we can’t afford all those other cuts if we’re going to maintain the kinds of protections that low income people increasingly need in this highly unequal economy.

VALLAS: Now in addition, there’s also his tax plan that we’re all watching for. We saw a lot during the campaign. We’ve seen sort of, bits and pieces leaked on both the budget and the tax side in recent weeks. But what he’s planning in the form of tax cuts to the wealthy and to corporations would force further cuts. How does that work?

BERNSTEIN: Well so, that’s another part of the plan wherein these numbers just make absolutely no sense. If you cut taxes, and he has a $6 trillion dollar tax cut over ten years, so it’s a very significant tax cut, and as is often the case with these Republican programs it’s disproportionately steered towards those at the top of the income scale. So you have this heavily weighted tax cut towards the wealthy. So that’s part one. Part two is he’s talking about spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure or something like that. Then he’s talking about this extra money for defense, as we’ve mentioned. It’s simply implausible that you’re going to be able to cut deeply enough into the rest of government. Oh, and he puts Social Security and Medicare off the table. Now that’s a good thing, but it does kind of restrict you in terms of how you’re going to square your budget if you’ve got all these expenditures, defense, infrastructure, and a bunch of tax cuts too. So basically the underlying message is we’re just going to go after everything in the budget, all the stuff that’s not the entitlements and not defense and that’s everything else. And that’s what I was talking about before. And you know, I published a piece the other day that said if you really did that and you tried to balance the budget in 10 years you’d have to wipe out the rest of government. You’d have to basically go to zero. So they’re not going to do that, they’re going to just increase the deficits a lot. Now, you know, I’m not a deficit hawk. But I don’t want to waste any deficit spending on needless wasteful tax cuts for wealthy people and cuts on the other hand, for programs for people who need that support.

VALLAS: So you mentioned Social Security and Medicare. It’s been heavily reported both throughout the campaign and in the month or so since Trump took office that he committed not to cutting Social Security and Medicare. But less widely reported has been that he also pledged not to cut Medicaid. And he reiterated in his speech earlier this week, a promise, and I’m just going to use his buzzwords here and then we can unpack them, to give states the resources and flexibility they need with Medicaid to make sure no one is left out. And this of course, these words are coming at the same time as Washington is heavily debating an Affordable Care Act repeal and possible replacement bill that includes sharp and devastating cuts to Medicaid. Help us make sense of this. Is he keeping his promise not to cut Medicaid?

BERNSTEIN: So let’s talk about Medicaid and then a little bit about Medicare and Social Security together. So, for listeners to understand what this is all about you have to know what block grants are. And a block grant is when you gives states a fixed amount of resources to fund a particular program. The program called TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families was block granted back in 1996 when the allocation for that program was $16 and a half billion. It’s still getting $16.5 billion. These many, twenty plus years later. And the thing about that is, that means there’s been no adjustment for inflation or population growth and of course the program has been severely gutted. And we looked a bunch of programs that have been block granted and most of them have lost ground like that. If you do that with Medicaid, they call it a per capita cap or a block grant, I think sometimes they call it an opportunity grant. So they’re just playing with words. It’s a euphemism because what you’re going to do is give the states a fixed amount of money to administer a program that’s supposed to ramp up with need and ramp down when things get better. But if you’re eligible you’re supposed to get those programs. Eventually, under a block grant, you won’t. So that is a very significant and damaging cut to Medicaid. And everybody, as you suggest, should recognize that for what it is. On Social Security and Medicaid, yes, the president claimed that he’s not going to touch them. And of course, Republicans want to cut them. And my fear is that once this budget kind of, chicanery goes into motion, all these machinations I talked about where the numbers don’t come anywhere close to adding up, they’re going to try to say, well, we’ll make it back on the growth side because their plan is just so awesome, it’s going to grow GDP much faster and they’re going to actually build an unrealistically high growth rate into their plan.

When all of that doesn’t happen and they’re looking at redding forever, I suspect they throw their hands up and say, gosh we’re really sorry but we have to put Social Security and Medicare on the table and cut them. And I think in some ways that may be kind of the long term play they’re undertaking here.

VALLAS: Forcing and teeing up that situation so that it becomes inevitable to cut those programs.

BERNSTEIN: Exactly.

VALLAS: So, there were some pieces of the speech, and you’ve mentioned bits and pieces, you mentioned infrastructure. But there were some portions of the speech that folks have pointed to, some in the media as illustrations of Trump actually keeping his promises to fight for the working class, for the forgotten man and woman of America. His buzzwords throughout the campaign. And in his inauguration speech and beyond. And three of those are what he’s holding up as a $1 trillion dollar investment in infrastructure. But he also mentioned paid parental leave and child care. And I guess I’m curious, your thoughts on whether we should giving him credit for embracing these priorities and whether the policies that we expect for him to advance in these areas hold water when it comes to whether he’s keeping his promises to these folks.

BERNSTEIN: You know, there’s this old movie with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Bing Crosby plays this guy who is kind of a really shady character. And every time Bob Hope shakes hands with him, he counts his fingers afterwards to make sure they’re all still there.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: I don’t believe what President Trump says and neither should anybody else because the things he says, you know, on Tuesday may be completely different on Wednesday. So, part A is you really can’t take him literally. That’s kind of a buzzword about Trump. Don’t take him literally, take him seriously. I’m not sure what to make of that but I sure don’t take him literally. He has, and think people call this ‘Ivankacare’ because I think she talked about it originally. He’s put forth a program to help people pay for nannycare really more than child care because it’s a tax credit and it doesn’t look like it’s refundable or at least we don’t know that it will be, and our suspicion is that it won’t. And this ends up being kind of an upside down tax break for people who pay the highest tax rates who, you know, really don’t need the break. So the idea that President Trump is going to do anything for low income people is completely belied by the budget discussion we were having earlier. Remember, you can’t do a giant tax cut, take Social Security and Medicare off the table, plus up defense, do infrastructure, and then add more for a bunch of low income programs. And in fact, what they’re very very explicitly saying is we’re going to pay for this by cutting the non-defense side of the discretionary budget which as I mentioned, is where Head Start, job training, housing assistance, where a lot of stuff lives.

VALLAS: And digging a little bit deeper into those three policies because he has said somethings that we can point to. You mentioned ‘Ivankacare’, which I can’t quite get used to saying but there it is. We have it. But also his paid leave policy, which really should be called more of a parental leave policy that he has started to put some meat on the bones of. Also wouldn’t necessarily help the people that he is purporting to help. And it actually would dramatically weaken the nation’s already underfunded unemployment insurance program. How does that work?

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, so this is the idea of taking some money from the insurance trust funds and using it for parental leave. And I, you know, as you said, the key thing to watch in these programs is A, are they you know, really serious about them or is this just some sort of passing phrase that you heard. And I suspect the latter, again it looks to me like they’re going to try to pay for all the stuff they’re doing on the defense side and on the tax cut side by cutting precisely the kinds of programs that are targeted at moderate and low income people and I would say this probably fits under that rubric as well.

VALLAS: So then in the last couple of minutes that I have with you, what should we be looking for in the weeks ahead? There are intonations that a budget may actually be coming from the Trump administration. It may be coming soon. We’ve been seeing leaks here and there, including a so-called hit list of programs that his budget office would actually like to eliminate outright. What should we be watching for, and how does it fit in with what we’ve heard so far.

BERNSTEIN: Well, it’s like if we watch what they do, not what they say. And I think the best way to watch what they do is as you suggest, to look at the budget. Now I think what we’re going to get in a couple of weeks, they said they’re going to release kind of a budget outline mid-March. It’s going to have a lot of numbers in it that I suspect will back up precisely what I’m saying here. There are going to be unrealistic growth estimates in terms of, they’ll say GDP is going to eventually grow 3 or 4 percent, so that’s going to help them pay for the programs. There’s going to be very large tax cuts, a very important thing to look for so in the ACA repeal, the Obamacare repeal, are they going to repeal Obamacare and essentially end the taxes that support it. Because Obamacare is actually supported by very progressive taxes. And if you essentially give that money back to kind of the high end investor class, it’s going to be a huge tax cut for the wealthy on top of the Trump tax cut which already pushes in that direction. So look for all of that regressive stuff but at the same time look for them trying to offset some of the costs by cutting the non-discretionary side of the appropriations budget. And so everybody has to learn about these very unfortunate words called non-defense discretionary, NDD. The part of the budget that is appropriated on an annual basis but isn’t defense. Because we know they want to plus up defense. NDD is already far too low to meet the kinds of needs that I articulated a few minutes ago and they’re talking about cutting it even further.

VALLAS: Jared Bernstein is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He’s also the former chief economist to Vice President Biden. Jared, thank you so much for joining Off Kilter.

BERNSTEIN: Thanks for inviting me.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Before moving into the White House, Donald Trump was the face of Trump University, a for-profit institution that saddle it’s so called graduates with thousands of dollars in debt, while doing little to advance their job prospects. But Trump U is far from unique. More than 2 million American students are currently enrolled in for-profit colleges. And they are three to four times more likely to default on their loans than other student borrowers. With me to discuss the rise of for-profit education is Tressie McMillan Cottom. She’s a sociology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She’s also the author of “Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For Profit Colleges in the New Economy.” Tressie, thanks so much for joining the show.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Thank you for having me, Rebecca.

VALLAS: So I want to start, before we even get into the nitty gritty of what for profit institutions are, and kind of all of the meat of your book, you actually were a recruiter and worked in admissions in the for-profit education world. You’ve seen this from the inside. How did you get involved doing that kind of work and what was it like?

COTTOM: Well, you know, it’s actually less surprising I think than people think. In many ways, I ended up working in for-profit colleges for the same reasons that so many students end up attending them. Which is, for millions of people, there really is not a distinction between a for profit college and a traditional college. Sure we have some sense that kind of maybe going to school in an office park is different. But we don’t tend to chalk that up to its corporate structure, right. So the difference between for-profit and not-for-profit. So in many ways I was like my students, which is a recruiter called me one day actually.

VALLAS: You got recruited to be a recruiter.

COTTOM: I got recruited to be a recruiter, that’s right. And to come help students help themselves, right. And to do that in a school. Now that I understood. Some of that being attributed to being African-American and in our tradition, culturally, all school is good school. There is no reason why I should have had some sort of filter for ascertaining whether or not this was a good school. There’s no such thing as bad school where I’m from, and again, in that way, I’m like millions of people. But what was the job like? It was actually, there were some differences. I worked across two different for-profit colleges during my time. And one of the things that I sort of try to tease apart was there really was a difference between the for-profit college that was training students for a very specific job. In my case, cosmetology. That they really could not get anywhere else. And at a for-profit college that was not a shareholder organization or corporately traded. That moving from that, however, to later what I call the technical college was vastly different. Everything about the technical college was oriented towards how they had to generate profit. Because they were a shareholder organization. But there were also remarkable similarities, which is that how we understood our likely student was deeply embedded in the assumptions we had about the kinds of choices they had available to them. And everything about the admissions process was set up to counter the fact that they really did not have any other practical choices.

VALLAS: So, help break that down a little bit. I feel like there’s been, because of Trump University, throughout the campaign, the presidential campaign last year, there was a lot of coverage in the media of for-profit schools and some of the tactics that they used to try to recruit students and the word predator and prey was often used to describe their behavior and how they acted. What were some of those tactics and what was it like actually being part of having to use them?

COTTOM: Yeah, so we actually get that language a lot. And it’s one of those that I really hope we can sort of unpack a little bit. Yeah, there is this idea that what we call intrusive counseling, right. What some other for-profit colleges have been charged with what they call the pain funnel. But it was the idea that you needed to target what the students obstacles were to enrolling and you needed to overcome them before they became an obstacle. And the number one assumption that we had about our students, what the obstacle was for them, is a lack of faith in themselves. They didn’t think that they could go to college. Many of our students, especially the lower income students, had had very negative experiences with school. And that’s one of those things, if you grew up middle class, sounds really odd to you. But there are millions of people for whom going to K through 12 was not a positive experience. And they have to be encouraged, right, to have a positive expectation of their school experience. So I remember hearing repeatedly, our kind of student, now that almost always was how it was said. Our kind of student needs to believe in herself. For-profit college students are disproportionately women, it’s always her, would be accurate. She needs to believe in herself. So the idea that we weren’t selling them a bad product but that we were helping them to believe in themselves and that they could do school was a significant part of how the enrollment process was set up. So everything from that first phone call where you were encouraged to pull apart what their obstacles to enrollment might be. So again, when you’re dealing with a lot of working class people, that’s really basic stuff like, I don’t have a car. And the bus stops running out to your side of town at 6 o’clock. How am I going to get back and forth? The second biggest thing was child care. I don’t have child care. And so we were trained to sort of prime them for what those obstacles were and to provide them immediate on demand solutions.

Again, at the beauty college especially, that may have helped some of the young women who may not have had any other occupational choice but broadly the way I came to understand that was that intrusive counseling was a great thing if you are using it to enroll a student in a college that can actually help them change their lives for the better. So it’s actually not the intrusive part that’s the really predator part. The predatory part is using intrusive counseling to sell them something.

VALLAS: Sort of as emotional manipulation.

COTTOM: Exactly.

VALLAS: You use this phrase that comes up and there’s actually sort of a graphic that goes along with it, of the pain funnel. What is the pain funnel and how does that playing into the emotional manipulation you’re describing?

COTTOM: The pain funnel is about sustaining motivation on the part of a student. Whose life is very complicated. It’s very easy to lose that student from the first time they call you to the most important part of the process, which is when they clear the obstacles for us getting a federal student aid check for them. And so in most cases that means showing up on the first day of class. Getting that student, who has transportation issues, child care issues, again, complicated lives from point A to point B is really difficult. So the pain funnel was about sparking their motivation. And they understood, for-profit colleges understood the number one motivator for our kind of student, the kind of student likely to call a 1–800 number about college, was that they were afraid. They were afraid of something. Losing a job, losing some sort of benefits, losing their health insurance because it was attached to their job, so the pain funnel was about reminding them of why they had called us in the first place. And because that was so often motivated by pain and fear it means bringing up the moment of fear again, to sort of sustain their motivation through the enrollment process.

VALLAS: So the key question that you really ask in your book, “Lower Ed”, is why is somebody with so few assets being encouraged to take on student loan debt? And you were describing other barriers, whether emotional, psychological or practical, but of course we’re talking about people who for the most part, are being targeted because they actually don’t have a lot of money and they have limited education. So people who are not going to be in a position to pay back debt that they take on unless they get a great job and all of a sudden bringing in the money, and you answer that question in a very interesting way by bringing in the welfare system and its decline. How do you make that connection?

COTTOM: The connection for me, actually starts with a quote from the former president of the lobbying group for for-profit colleges, who said, I think I cite him at some point in the book, he said, this might have been somewhere around 2005. He said, you know, we hear from our enrollment counselors all the time that the number one reason people tell them that they came to our school was because they had either just lost their job or they were afraid of losing their job. So this starts to prime something, of course, in me, that there is something about the connection between people’s insecurity in the labor market and how willing they are to buy really, frankly, whatever promises somebody was willing to sell them. And that’s actually perfectly rational. What was irrational and what was for me, the real problem was why were so many people feeling economically insecure? And why was the only solution we had to offer them to go to college by any means necessarily? It’s the by any means necessary part is where the debt and the poverty and the inequality shows up. Because what we have said to people for about 30 years now in our social policy is move from welfare to work, right, as quickly as possible.

The second part of that, the caveat to that was, oh and if there is no work available go get training for work. But nobody said where you were supposed to get that training. Or how you were supposed to pay for it. And frankly, those who are reengineering the welfare system didn’t care. They’ve said consistently, didn’t matter to us we just want them off the welfare rolls. Well, there was no other system for millions of people who needed job training to get it except to go through our student loan system. That made their insecurity very profitable, which created a consumer demand for for-profit colleges and that’s the reason why we see this rapid explosive growth of for-profit colleges over the last 20 years.

VALLAS: Now you describe not just the rise of these institutions as really an incredible profitable cottage industry. But that the students that they are bringing in and processing and pushing out with in many cases, very little in the way of increased job prospects, that this whole phenomenon can’t be separated from larger questions of race, of gender, and of work. And I’m really interested in hearing you talk a little bit more about the race and gender components.

COTTOM: Oh, thank you for letting me, because that’s actually one of my favorite parts to talk about. Because it’s been stunning to me for all that coverage that you described earlier of for-profit colleges. What no one has said consistently is that this is a problem for women. This is actually a woman’s problem. You know who is going to for-profit colleges? The very people who are responsible for child care. Because they are responsible for child care is the very reason they have to go to the for-profit college. Because they have to balance their social responsibilities to their families with trying to stay viable in the labor market. They have so many people depending on them. Almost a full 60, 65 percent, I think is the most recent numbers, and that’s gone up and down a little bit at one point in 2005 it was almost a full two-thirds. But we’re still at about almost 70 percent of all for-profit college students are women. The lower you go down in for-profit colleges, meaning down to the certificates level where really the poor students, it’s three-quarters of those students are women. 75 percent. So when we talk about student loan debt, since for-profit colleges have driven so much of the student loan debt, and especially loan defaults, that’s a gender problem. That’s problem for gender equality. When women are carrying that significant amount of student loan debt, there are a myriad of things they can’t do. They cannot save for their retirement, and we know the problems of women growing older without the safety net accrued from having their husbands income or wealth. We know that older women are more likely to be poor than are older men. We know that women are disproportionately taking on the costs of getting their kids through college. We know all of those things, and so if they’re taking on the significant debt to stay viable in the labor market, to still be paid less than men for the same jobs, then we’ve got sort of what I call a cradle to grave pipeline of what is essentially gendered debt.

VALLAS: And to come back to the race piece as well. When you were describing your path to actually getting recruited to be a recruiter for some of these schools, you named the fact that you are an African-American woman. And I’m curious, not just about the link here similar the way that you just described the gender component, but also about how you felt when you were doing that work, not being in necessarily a very different situation than a lot of the people on the other side of the table or the other side of the phone line that you were recruiting. Is it fair to make a comparison to some of the literature out there looking at welfare caseworkers and their interactions with their clients.

COTTOM: Oh, absolutely, no absolutely. So as one of the for-profit college executives told me once, oh our kind of students by which he meant, he had a school that was almost 100 percent women, disproportionately African-American and hispanic. He said, oh our kind of students respond to women in authority roles, they want the other mother. And so they had set up the entire enrollment process at their college to be staffed with women because they knew their likely student, that would resonate with them. That was me. I had been hired in part, what I had to reflect on and come to grips with, that I’d been hired in part precisely because I looked so similar to the likely typical student, our kind of student. As my mother would say, you know again we’re from the south and that’s going to matter here in a moment. Is my mother would say there before the grace of God go I. There were really a series of very small decisions that distinguished my educational and career track from the African-American women I was dealing with. And in fact, in doing the study much later, I talked to black woman after black woman after black woman and we’d sit at, like you said, across the table looking at each other. They knew my life was different, I knew theirs was different, and as much as that gave us something to talk about, it was extremely emotionally distraught. Why had my life become so different, that I had come back to ask them these questions and why hadn’t their life turned out similarly. It was actually quite complicated.

VALLAS: Did you feel guilt ever about what you were roping people into?

COTTOM: Oh yes. What I think ultimately, at the time less so because again, I didn’t have any understanding of them as being different in any fundamental way. Certainly not until much later at the technical college. But once I started to understand that, oh absolutely. I think in part what motivated me to do a study that centered the experiences of the students was precisely because I understood intimately that calling them prey, really made them responsible for structural problems in a way that I had once done. And I didn’t want to recreate that.

VALLAS: In the last 60 seconds I have with you, you write in your book, if it were up to you, for-profit colleges would not be allowed to do anything about certificate level training. They would be heavily regulated. They would be administered at the state level. And there would be caps on the tuition that they could charge. Is there a reason that you don’t call for outright abolition of the entire industry?

COTTOM: Yes, because I know that for, again, especially for African-American and Hispanic low income women, there is a set of careers out there that are heavily regulated. I think about cosmetology, I think about some of the few good, quote unquote, good jobs left in the service economy that really do change these women’s lives if they can get there. They shouldn’t have to pay so much for it and unfortunately public higher education has never competed for serving them better in that capacity. Shutting down the schools without giving them a pathway to those jobs, less expensively and more quality training, really is just going to further shut them out of a very very narrow part of the market where they can at least have dignified work for decent pay.

VALLAS: Tressie McMillan Cottom is a sociology professor at VCU, Virginia Commonwealth University. She’s also the author of “Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For Profit Colleges in the New Economy.” And you can follow her on twitter like I do, @Tressiemcphd. Thanks so much for joining the show.

COTTOM: Thank you for having me.

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VALLAS: Welcome back to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. This spring, America is going on strike against Trump. Anti-Trump sentiment has generated calls for one of the most difficult mass demonstrations, the general strike. With me to discuss, what this means and how this fits in with a broad history of protest movements is Bryce Covert. She’s the economics editor at Think Progress. Bryce, thanks so much for joining Off Kilter.

BRYCE COVERT: Thank you for having me on.

VALLAS: So, folks may have been hearing a little bit about the women’s strike that’s scheduled to take place next week on March 8th. But tell us a little bit more about what’s being discussed, the magnitude of this, and what is a general strike?

COVERT: Sure. So just to give listeners a sense of what’s happening, you know, there’s been a lot of mobilization and protesting in the wake of the election. Obviously the women’s march the day after inauguration was huge, there was marches on JFK and other airports, really sustained momentum. I started to see that more from asking people to go out on the streets to protest on their free time to calling for general strikes. A general strike is basically a strike that is not about one issue and one workplace, but trying to ask a large number of people across workplaces, across identities to go on strike at the same time on the same day. And so there have been already a couple smaller ones. There was, for example a general strike that was called on February 17th. And then there were some similar things staged that we specific to immigrants, one on February 13th in Milwaukee and then three days later across the country ‘A Day without Immigrants’, particularly restaurant workers who didn’t go to work and a lot of restaurants that closed their doors in solidarity. But what’s happening now is that these calls are getting bigger and are asking huge numbers across the country if not the entire country, to go on strike. One is the women’s strike that’s coming up on March 8th, which is international women’s day. And then another is being planned for immigrants, again a day without immigrants on May 1st, which is May Day.

VALLAS: Now you wrote an article about general strikes and specifically about these two strikes that you just mentioned; the women’s strike and then the immigrants day in March and May respectively, both of which are coming up. But you also kind of look back at trends in resistance movements and in protests movements. And you find that we’ve seen a huge downtick in strikes and other kinds of work stoppages over the last decade. Why have we seen that decline, and how does that fit in with the broader conversation around the decline of unions?

COVERT: Yeah well, you just said it, one really big reason I think to point to when we look at the declining numbers of strikes, generally speaking in the economy is the declining membership of Americans in unions. Less than 11 percent of the American workforce is represented by a union. That used to be about 20 percent in 1983, and higher before then. And so as union power and coverage have declined, there’s just less organizing happening in that way in America’s workplaces. So there were fewer work stoppables, you know, people deciding to stop doing their work and walk out over the last decade than used to happen in a single year before the 1980s. Last year there was just 15 major strikes in the workplace. And these are not really general strikes, these are just workplace specific strikes, so you can see how challenging it can be in an atmosphere where even in workplaces people are not really using this particular tool to then get people to use it across workplaces and across identities and do a mass mobilization in this way.

VALLAS: So I don’t know what your plans are on March 8th and whether you’re planning on working or staying home in solidarity with the women’s strike. But I think you and I are lucky enough to be in jobs where if we were to decide to go on strike, not to be at work, we would have job protected leave. That’s not necessarily the case for a lot of the folks that we’re going to see taking to the streets on these days. Can you talk a little bit about what folks are risking if they participate in these kinds of movements and what the significance is there?

COVERT: Absolutely, and I think it’s really important for people to know what they’re getting into before they decide to be part of this. Like you said, if you have something like paid sick leave or paid vacation, and you’re able to just call out that day, your job is protected by that leave and you should be alright. But if you don’t or if you simply don’t show up and say that you’re on strike, you actually don’t have that many legal protections if you’re participating in a general strike. If you’re in a workplace and you and your co-workers have a particular issue and you guys go on strike, there are rules in place that would protect your job when you come back. But if you’re an individual who decides I’m not going to work because I’m going to protest a political issue or a larger issue than just something in my workplace, when you come back your job is not necessarily protected. You could be fired and that could be upheld legally. So it’s definitely trick and of course, the people in our economy who are least likely to have that job protected leave are the ones who earn the least. And that’s going to also include a lot of immigrant workers who may be, for example, taking part in a day without immigrants. So it puts a lot on the line and I already see people who are pledging to strike, acknowledging this and saying if I get fired because of this, it’s worth it. And you know I think if that’s the choice you make that’s fine, but people need to know that that may be the choice that they’re making.

VALLAS: So are there places that people can go to find out how they can plug in with these strikes if they’re not already involved. If they’re not already engaged. If this is something that they want to be involved with?

COVERT: Yeah, there’s websites for all of these. March 8th, there’s sort of two different groups that are organizing them. One is the website is womenstrikeus.org. Because it’s part of an international day, there’ll be women striking in 30 other countries as well. The women’s march website, also where they’ve organized the post inauguration march, they have information there if you want to be part of that one. The day without immigrants is being organized by the Cosecha movement. So you can get in touch with those folks, that’s you know, coming up in May so there is a little bit more time to plan there. But a lot of info is on the web, not just about of course the day, and organizing but there are different ways to participate that aren’t necessarily walking off the job and risking your work. For the women’s strike, for example you can abstain from unpaid labor in the home. For the immigrant’s strike, they’re also encouraging boycotts and just not spending any money. So there are lots of ways to get involved if you want to.

VALLAS: And in the last minute or so that I have with you, what do you think that these general strikes, rare as they have come to be, now signify about whether the resistance movement that has really galvanized in opposition to the Trump agenda, what do you think that these strikes represent with respect to whether that movement can keep up the momentum past just these early days of the administration?

COVERT: Well, I think it’s a little bit yet to be seen exactly what happens on March 8th, and May Day, and then after that. If huge numbers of people really do join a general strike, that will I think quite remarkable and pretty historical. This is just not in our country. And again, it can have really big impacts. There was a strike that women staged in Poland recently, and they were able to roll back legislation that would potentially basically made abortion illegal. But you know, they’ve got hurdles in front of them when it comes to organizing. We’ll see how many people actually do it and whether it’s sustain afterwards of course, because none of them want to just be a one day thing.

VALLAS: Bryce Covert is the economics editor at Think Progress. You can find her article about this topic and more on the general strikes being planned at ThinkProgress.org. It’s called “This Spring America is Going on Strike Against Trump” Bryce, thanks so much for joining Off Kilter.

COVERT: Thank you.

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VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Ten years ago, before the Affordable Care Act was passed, Sara Borgstede became a 26 year old widow with a two year old child. As the debate around repealing and possibly replacing the Affordable Care Act continues in Washington, she joins to share her family’s story about how health insurance changes lives. Sara, thank you so much for joining Off Kilter.

SARA BORGSTEDE: Thank you Rebecca.

VALLAS: So just to kick us off, thank you so much for being willing to share an incredibly difficult and incredibly painful and very personal story. What happened in your family’s lives that left you a widow.

BORGSTEDE: Well, I kind of have to go back a long way. My husband Bob and I were highschool sweethearts and we married in 2001. He was just coming out of college and I was still working on my education. The story of what happened with him really began was in about 2005. He was having some stomach aches and we were you know, just starting out in our life together still. Between the two of us we were working ten jobs at that time. None of those jobs provided health insurance so we purchased our own policy but the policy we were able to purchase was not a very useful policy for us because we had been denied for more useful coverage because my husband had a pre-existing condition and he was somewhat overweight. But one of the letters that we got back from one of the insurance companies listed his acne, that he had had ten years previous in high school as a pre-existing condition that caused the policy that we had to be not very useful to us. It was very expensive and had low lifetime caps and high co-pays. And so you know, we were really busy just starting out and Bob started having these stomach aches, as I said. And he didn’t do much about it because we needed to be working. And so they kind of got a little worse and a little worse and so even though we were covered, we couldn’t really afford to pay for medical care, even though we had the coverage. So he kind of let it go for a while and when he went to the E.R. finally we found out it was just gallstones, and the doctor said, well you know, that’s ok, the attacks will get bad enough that you’ll come and beg us to have your gallbladder out but until that happens you can wait.

And then a wonderful thing happened, Bob was hired to teach full time as a music professor at our local community college. So that cut the number of jobs that we have down a lot. And we had a new son, he was two years old. So Bob was like, ok now we finally got this medical coverage. I’m going to wait until my first year of teaching is done and then I’m going to get my gallbladder out. But unfortunately it didn’t work out that way because he called me on March 22nd of 2007 and said, OK, you have to take me to the ER, this is ridiculous. So I picked him up and took him to the E.R. and found out that one of the gallstones in his gallbladder had gotten into his pancreas. And so he had pancreatitis, which is common but also very painful. Bob ended up in the I.C.U, and was there for three weeks, and then was air lifted to a larger hospital and was in the I.C.U. at that hospital for three weeks, and then he died of sepsis. And what bothers me about that, besides the emotional loss, is that we were trying to do everything right, but since our health coverage was a burden enough on us financially, we couldn’t afford to both have health coverage and pay for care in time for him to get the very basic thing that would have saved his life in the end.

VALLAS: And when you describe that the coverage was financially unaffordable for you, that’s because you had a deductible, it was a catastrophic insurance plan is what you had actually purchased and there was a deductible that was incredibly high that you couldn’t afford to meet.

BORGSTEDE: That’s right, yeah. And we already had medical debts from like my husband had his wisdom teeth taken out. So we were paying a lot of money already for medical expenses and so we really just didn’t feel like we could afford to take on more when it first became a problem. And then my husband was, once we were covered by his employer, he was afraid that if he took time off right after he was employed, that he would lose that job. And then we would have maybe even a gap in coverage, we were very afraid of losing health insurance, even though we had it.

VALLAS: You write in a column for TalkPoverty.org where you share your story that everything could have gone very differently if the ACA had passed in 2004 instead of in 2009. You would have had coverage, that you weren’t afraid to use because Bob wouldn’t have been denied coverage that was affordable for you based on a preexisting condition.

BORGSTEDE: Yeah, and we were also afraid of acquiring another preexisting condition, that was another one of the reasons too. You know, we had already gotten this diagnosis that he had gallstones, so then we were very aware that this was a problem, these preexisting conditions are a problem that’s preventing us from being able to afford care. So it makes you not want to go to the doctor, because you’re afraid that you’ll get a diagnosis that makes it even harder for you to get care, and I’m feeling that really strongly now because I have a twelve year old son whose name is also Bob who is also on his way to becoming a musician just like his dad. And you know, my son Bobby, he’s going to have acne too. And if the ACA is repealed, he could end up at 19 not having health insurance and not being able to buy it because I have him take acne medication. You know that’s what happened with his father and if we don’t have protections in the law against that happening again, it could very easily happen again.

VALLAS: You’ve begun sharing your story publicly for the first time because of the debate that is raging in Washington right now around repealing and Republicans claim they want to replace the Affordable Care Act. But you’ve done more than getting involved and sharing your story with press and with the public. You’ve also become politically engaged for the first time. Can you tell me a little bit about the work that you’ve been doing and the experiences you’re having communicating with policymakers in Washington?

BORGSTEDE: Yeah, well, I didn’t realize for a long time how connected policy was to what was happening to me personally. And so I’m sort of part of a very large movement of political awakening and volunteerism and things. So as I started seeing how policy affects my life and my future and my children’s future I started looking for avenues to be more active. And the first one that I found was with RESULTS, which is a grassroots citizens bipartisan advocacy organization that’s been around for 37 years. Advocating for policies that work against poverty, that lift people up out of poverty here and around the world. And so I have with that organization gotten to tell my story to staff and aides to Senator McCaskill’s office in St. Louis. So another avenue that I have gotten involved with is the grassroots organizing that’s happening in my hometown. I’ve been watching on facebook as my friends and neighbors get more involved in politics and so that’s how I came across the indivisible movement and so I started following them. And one of our local organizers asked, you know is there anyone here who has a story to share about the ACA. And I said yes, I really do.

And so it turns out, as I’m sharing my story that I’m learning that there are so many more people than just me that have stories of tragedy and fear and things that their representatives need to hear. And so the local chapter of Indivisible was able to get a meeting with our representative and myself and three other constituents went and spoke for 45 minutes with our representative Mike Bost. So I have been fortunate enough to have access to my congressman, it has sort of fallen, rather unexpectedly on my very green shoulders that I have become someone who is almost acting as a spokesperson for that office. Since he isn’t speaking directly to our constituents.

VALLAS: So Sara, in those meetings and moving forward, what is your message to congress? What do you hope that leaders in Washington take away from your story?

BORGSTEDE: What bothers me about what’s happening with the healthcare debate is that I fear that it’s becoming more about what’s happening between political parties and less about what’s happening to our individual Americans and from where I sit and based on my own experience I just fear that if we allow the healthcare debate to become a game, it’s going to become a game that’s about people’s lives. And if we fail to come to consensus on this we risk that there will be many more lives like my husband’s, he was, there will just be many more incandescent American lives like his that will flicker out needlessly because we haven’t found a way to work together.

VALLAS: Sara Borgstede, thank you so much for joining Off Kilter, and for being willing and being brave enough to share a very difficult and painful and person story, good luck to you in the grassroots organizing that you’re doing and I hope that folks in Washington are listening.

BORGSTEDE: Thank you so much for having me, Rebecca.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced each week by Eliza Schultz. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @OffKilterShow. And you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio network, or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.