Post-1992 universities could begin to change their legal status and open up to private investment in the wake of the University of Central Lancashire's application to the government to become a private company.
Most of the growth in private institution enrollment between 2000 and 2010 occurred among for-profit institutions—their enrollment increased more than 300 percent, from 0.4 to 1.7 million students. Enrollment at private nonprofit institutions increased by 20 percent, from 2.2 to 2.7 million students.
FoI reveals moves and countermoves in struggle for state cash and influence. For-profit providers have pressed the government to give them greater access to publicly funded student loans and open up teaching grant in high-cost subjects.
Keri Trimble, a 33-year-old employee at a utility call center, was shopping for an online college so she could take classes at night and on weekends. Trimble rejected Apollo Group Inc. (APOL)’s University of Phoenix, the dominant player in the market for selling Internet degrees to working adults. Instead, she chose Arizona State University’s program, which typically charges almost 30 percent less.
Free online courses offered by universities including Harvard and Princeton may one day award college credit, after a higher education trade group said it will study their eligibility.
The Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) has awarded 7,000 scholarships to students of private institutions this year based on the Royal Directives of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said.
The emergence and growth of private higher education in Poland has been widely regarded as one of the greatest achievements of the country's transformation in the 1990s. Now, however, the sector is endangered - not only due to great demographic pressure, but also to unfair treatment of private institutions by the state. These issues dominated celebrations of the 20th anniversary of private higher education in Poland last month.
If all goes according to plan, Grand Canyon University's teams will play in a Division I athletics conference and its campus will maintain a hub of academic research. But it won't be easy for the Phoenix-based for-profit college, as its entire industry is under heavy scrutiny from the Obama administration and members of Congress, and since GCU was singled out in a U.S. Senate report just a few months ago.
The controversial for-profit college industry, threatened by the Obama administration's efforts to hold it accountable for a torrent of waste, fraud, and abuse at the expense of students and taxpayers, bet heavily on a Romney and GOP victory in 2012.
A task force convened by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities released a final report Wednesday that recommends changes to the Department of Education's annual financial responsibility measurement, a combination of three financial ratios that helps determine whether institutions can qualify for federal financial aid.
Education Management Corporation, which enrolls 72,000 students on 72 campuses in 24 states, agreed to sell itself last week to two private equity firms for $3.4-billion, becoming the first publicly traded higher-education company to turn private. The move triggered speculation among analysts that the deal could lead to other takeovers of for-profit colleges.
State agencies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania are reviewing the recruiting or financial-aid practices of two colleges owned by the Career Education Corporation, according to a quarterly report the for-profit higher-education company filed last week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
For-profit colleges collected $32 billion from the federal government in the 2010-11 academic year, but three of those schools will now be cut off from that money.
In a speech before a group of career-college executives and lobbyists, freshman Representative Jason Altmire hinted that he would look out for the sector's interests in a coming conference between the House of Representatives and the Senate on legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act.