More than 2 million students attend for-profit colleges.

Explore the factors that led to this sector’s rapid expansion during a June 12 #NACACreads discussion of Lower Ed with author Tressie McMillan Cottom.

The Twitter chat will kick off at 2 p.m. (ET).

Cottom worked in enrollment at two for-profit colleges before returning to grad school to study sociology. She is now an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University where she studies higher education, work, and technological change in the new economy.

Use the hour-long Twitter chat to discuss what counselors and admission professionals can do to help students navigate an increasingly complex array of postsecondary choices, and learn how existing inequalities continue to shape access to education.

“The more insecure people feel, the more they are willing to spend money for an insurance policy against low wages, unemployment, and downward mobility,” Cottom writes in her book. “Those least likely to have an insurance policy that our labor market values are people for whom higher education has always been a long shot: poor people, single parents, the socially isolated, African Americans, the working class.”

Read an excerpt from the book.

Admitted writer/editor Mary Stegmeir welcomes additional comments and story ideas at mstegmeir@nacacnet.org.