Despite the claims that for-profit colleges serve an unmet need, are more nimble than stodgy traditional colleges, and increase access to poor and minority students, for-profit colleges—as I explain in my book, Lower Ed—target and thrive off of inequality. That inequality is just shrouded in euphemisms that don’t challenge the conventional wisdom of the educational gospel. It’s there, even in the rosiest interpretations of the rise of for-profit higher education, or “lower ed,” at the turn of the 21st century.

When economists say that these agile, responsive institutions are better suited to career training, they’re talking about inequality. In the knowledge economy, technological advancements make human labor more efficient. More work can be produced with fewer workers. A consequence of that efficiency has been greater economic insecurity. The more insecure people feel, the more they are willing to spend money for an insurance policy against low wages, unemployment, and downward mobility. 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.

When education researchers talk about the unmet consumer demand that for-profit colleges serve, they’re talking about inequality. Who is mostly likely to go to good schools with college-prep classes, have medical care and stable housing, focus on standardized tests, and have the money to participate in extracurricular activities? And who does not have those social resources that many traditional colleges assume their likely student will have? Again, the answer can be summed up by race, class, and gender.

When investors and politicians say that for-profit colleges offer a flexible solution to retrain the country’s workforce, they are talking about inequality. Whose training in the jobs of the 20th century is now obsolete in the 21st century? Who needs a flexible solution? Women who carry the burden of primary childcare, men working more than one job, older adults caring for both their parents and their own children—a group for whom time isn’t just money, but also the absence of money.

Flexible solutions, on-demand education, open-access career retraining, reskilling, and upskilling—these are terms that talk about inequality without taking inequality seriously. When these words and conceptualizations of for-profit higher education are used, strange conclusions follow. People with “low cognitive abilities” are blamed for enrolling in “low-quality” for-profit colleges.

The argument goes that more for-profit colleges are a democratic good despite the fact that the most vulnerable students pay a high price for attending them. It’s said that consumers drive products, as if students are consuming degrees rather than the promise of a good job. In effect, people are blamed for doing precisely what the education gospel demands that they do.