JAYFORCE

President Obama echoes the sentiment of Black people throughout the ages in America: The key to “winning the future” is to get educated. Get educated, get paid, live the American Dream. That’s the path to prosperity right… right?

Well, Kai Wright of Salon.com writes that something isn’t right:

‘…black college enrollment shot up by nearly 35 percent between 2003 and 2009, nearly twice the rate at which white enrollment increased…But this headlong rush of black Americans to get schooled has also led too many down a depressingly familiar path. As with the mortgage market of the pre-crash era, those who are just entering in the higher ed game have found themselves ripe for the con man’s picking. They’ve landed, disproportionately, at for-profit schools, rather than at far less expensive public community colleges, or at public universities. And that means they’ve found themselves loaded with unimaginable debt, with little to show for it…’

– Salon.com

Have we been had, hoodwinked, and bamboozled again? Kai makes a powerful argument. And were he here to speak on it today, Malcolm X might well quip: Plymouth rock landed on us. We climbed from under it. Then they dropped a mountain of debt on top of us!

Several of the top for-profit colleges are run by financiers, not educators. Damn. Now, more than ever, it costs to be poor; and it pays to exploit those striving for more.

READ THE FULL KAI WRIGHT WRITE-UP AT SALON.COM.