With college enrollments mushrooming in many nations but public support generally unable to keep up, the world is seeing a historic swing from public to private financing of higher education...
Laureate Education Inc, a for-profit higher education provider that boasts former U.S. President Bill Clinton as honorary chancellor, is planning to launch an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.
A specter of corruption is haunting the global campaign toward higher education internationalization. An overseas degree is increasingly valuable, so it is not surprising that commercial ventures have found opportunities on the internationalization landscape. New private actors have entered the sector, with the sole goal of making money. Some of them are less than honorable. Some universities look at internationalization as a contribution to the bottom line in an era of financial cutbacks. The rapidly expanding private higher education sector globally is largely for-profit. In a few cases, such as Australia and increasingly Britain, national policies concerning higher education internationalization tilt toward earning income for the system.
Although private non-profit colleges and universities have a long and distinguished history throughout the world, what has come to be known as ‘for-profit higher education’ is a relative newcomer.
Educators need to think beyond traditional models to expand access to higher education worldwide, said speakers at a conference sponsored by a private lending arm of the World Bank.
There are strong indications that demand for higher education is outstripping supply. In January, Gloria Sekwena died and at least 20 other people were seriously injured when about 5,000 people stampeded in a desperate attempt to register at the last minute with the University of Johannesburg. The university received more than 85,000 applications for fewer than 12,000 places last year.
Exploding demand for higher education during the last decade, especially in developing countries, has been accompanied by extraordinary growth in private provision and rising tensions over the entry of foreign institutions into local markets.
With college enrollments mushrooming in many nations but public support generally unable to keep up, the world is seeing a historic swing from public to private financing of higher education, the report says.
Greek riot police officers fired tear gas into a crowd of several thousand protesters in Athens this month, injuring about 15 people. While the protesters were primarily university students who oppose government proposals to restructure higher education in Greece, news reports suggested that the targets of the crackdown were "anarchists" who had infiltrated the demonstration to use it as a cover for vandalism.
However, the amount of legal threats, lawsuits, hacking attempts, domain hijacking attempts, and so forth on the part of for-profit institutions around the world (especially from the US and Canada) is something that we deal with every single day.
One more sign that colleges and companies see the financial possibilities of the international-student market: A British company that helps to bring students from China and other countries to campuses in the United States and other English-speaking nations has announced an investment of more than $100-million from a private-equity firm.
The International Finance Corporation on Wednesday announced a $150 million equity investment in Laureate Education, Inc., a Baltimore-based, privately held, for-profit education company that operates 65 career-oriented colleges in 29 countries.