The Political Economy of Risky Credentials: Proprietary Education and the Predation of Black Women

• In Event: The Racialized Political Economy of Education: Explorations of Antiblackness Across K–16

Abstract

This paper attends to for-profit colleges and universities’ (for-profits) exploitation of Black women’s economically precarious yet shifting positions through the domains of welfare, labor, and higher education. Here, the author regards economic precarity as a racialized, gendered, and classed location of material insecurity characterized by disproportionate social responsibilities and the structural denial of means to meet them. The author discusses how (1) neoliberal changes in federal policies made welfare a less feasible source of support for surviving poverty; how (2) survival was made contingent not only on employment but also on enrollment in for-profits; and how (3) for-profits geographically target and idealize Black women for “risky credentials” as a lucrative, government-guaranteed investment (McMillan Cottom, 2017). Ultimately, the author considers how the neoliberalization of welfare and higher education policy exploits Black women’s economic precarity through government-sanctioned, coerced enrollment in private, for-profit colleges and universities (for-profits).
Approaching capitalism as an always-already racialized project (Melamed, 2015), the author argues that neoliberal policy shifts engineer capital accumulation (Harvey, 2005) by compelling and coercing Black women, among others, to move from welfare to work through for-profit, debt-financed enrollment. Accordingly, this study contributes to scholarship that links education and welfare policies (Kantor & Lowe, 2013) with an explicit concern about Black women in higher education and the private, for-profit sector thereof. By studying the neoliberal shifts in the political economy of welfare and education, the author demonstrates how the recent terms of access for Black women in for-profits have been organized to systematically profit from and exacerbate inequality. This intersectional and anti-capitalist analysis cautions against the presumption that increased access for marginalized persons is necessarily progressive. Instead, this paper questions the viability of neoliberal policies and practices for advancing Black life.

Author

• Caleb Emmanuel Dawson, University of California - Berkeley