The Credential Society by Randall Collins is a classic on higher education and its role in American society. Forty years later, its controversial claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient. Collins's insights are especially prescient, as the scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom notes in the new edition's foreword, when considering how for-profit colleges have essentially preyed on the insecurities-and leeched off the loans and subsidies-of poor and working-class students.