I am glad to see the middle class getting some attention. It is long overdue. Perhaps my prespective is clouded because I am middle class but I think that efforts to expand the middle class are the best way to to address a myriad of social problems. How do we expand the middle class? This should be the topic for debate and the goal of our policies.

I think there ought to be a study of the efficacy, ethics and up-front investments placed by corporations into the plethora of corporate colleges popping up across the nation. My impression is that the accrediting organizations send people to these schools who sometimes do softball assessments in exchange for VIP treatment. Also, is there a revolving door from the accrediting agencies and the private sector?

These 'career colleges' make money hand over fist. In many of these schools, instructors are not salaried, but are paid only per hour in the classroom.

If instructor preparation time is not paid, such schools don't put their money where their mouth is. They advertise high quality instructors, but do not pay for high quality instruction or resources. Their books are expensive.

Not only do these colleges focus on "branding" too much (being for-profit companies) they often imitate names and branding from traditional schools without possessing anywhere near the quality of instruction or resources. However, they are enthusiastic about enrolling students and getting those loan forms filled out for ranges of 200 to 400 per semester hour.

What percentage of these school loans end up in collections, versus those of traditional universities? What is the employment rate of such schools?

Also, where is the indepedent spirit of free inquiry where, for example, a major investment house purchases an education management company which owns a number of colleges old and new, some of which have no track record to report to students, although they have aggressive sales operations? It smacks of an investment house controlling labor supply via the channeling and formation of student minds according to corporate desires, not according to a "think for yourself" method.

I spoke to an English composition teacher from one of those schools and asked her if she had ever used Strunk and White's "Elements of Style." She hadn't even heard of it.

Good luck with a new start-up. I hope other posts here will be more substantive, but you're entitled to let us know! But I also encourage you to seek more controversy. It's impressive to have a sitting senator argue at length and detail, and it's valuable, too, to present him alongside a reply. It's always good to have Hacker present his arguments while his book is still new. But I fear all too familiar and powerful names, in a stagnant remnant of the pro-business, largely prowar wing of the Democratic party.

We've Schumer, of course. As the respondents point out, he's asking for more congressional investigations, whereas he shows no sign of using the new congressional majority to initiate any. I've been opposed to cries for grass-roots pressure for impeachment as mental onanism or self-congragulation among us righteous liberals, in place of investigating hard, putting Bush on the spot to override a majority limiting war, and then letting the chips fall where they may. No sign here that Schumer is ready to begin.

We've Lind, whose NAF practically defines that Neoliberal point of view and here offers a radically regressive agenda, including increased taxation on income, decreased taxation on investments and property. And so on.

I think the key to the right's success for so many years has been to align the middle class politically with the wealthy against the poor, even if only the wealthy actually benefit. The race card and fundamentalism may play into that, but it's still the right's key goal and what holds together such strange bedfellows. I can only hope for a very different alignment, isolating the business elite instead. Hacker's concept of risk may help. But I worry that the magazine's thrust is to maintain the existing alignment, just nominating it as a candidate for helping the middle class. I don't think such a yuppie focus is ethically correct or can win.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

Good points.  They also remind me that the term "middle class" didn't really exist before World War II; the phrase was "working class."  There's not a causal relationship or anything, but that change seems indicative of how our understanding of "class" has evolved.

Also, the other day, I heard a report about college students and their attitudes toward class.  Students for whom money was not an issue tended to dismiss class as a significant element in opportunity or achievement.  Students in less comfortable circumstances generally saw their opportunities and experiences circumscribed by class barriers -- or at least doors that did not open to them because of money.