Tressie McMillan Cottom studies for-profit colleges as a sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. She's analyzed large data sets, scrutinized financial filings, interviewed students and staff. But she has also helped enroll students at two different for-profits herself. They're not named, but known only as "Beauty College" and "Technical College," in her new book, Lower Ed. NPR Ed has covered both the rise, and some of the travails, of this form of education. We called up Cottom to hear her thoughts. Here's an edited version of our conversation. The last few years brought a string of much-publicized closures and crackdowns on companies like Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute . But now we have a president who himself started the for-profit, nonaccredited Trump University, and reports are that the stocks of for-profit college companies are rising . You think for-profits will bounce back? Yup. I think the conditions are ripe for it. We attribute too much of that