It seems too good to be true, at least for companies. Customers arrive at for-profit colleges by the million. With them comes billions of dollars of federal student grants and loans, to be poured into corporate coffers. Public subsidies may provide up to 90% of revenue; the government bears the risk of loan defaults. This business model has served firms rather well. Its effect on students and taxpayers is less clear. This summer, however, a brawl over for-profit colleges has exploded at last.
Fly-by-night colleges operating in the Western Cape could soon be closed down, with police raids on illegal colleges expected to be continued across the country.
As the founder of KIIT University, a top private institution here, Achuyta Samanta has built an institution that occupies dozens of buildings across 350 acres of plush land. Yet he has no office.
India’s university regulator is likely to make it harder to establish private universities in the country as part of an effort to crack down on such institutions, C2live, a news Web site, reports. Many private higher-education providers have been caught offering courses without the regulator’s approval.
The recession has sent tuition-discount rates at private colleges soaring to record highs, reaching 41.8 percent in 2008. But some small colleges have managed to buck that trend, lowering their discount rates while raising enrollment.
But today they are facing two imminent threats to their near-monopoly of higher education. The first is the expansion of educational providers that exist solely on private support. The second comes from the small but growing efforts of for-profit universities, heavily influenced by commercial education ventures in the United States.
On leave from the government department of Georgetown University, Joshua Mitchell, acting chancellor of the American University of Iraq at Sulaimani, talks about the challenges of starting a private university in a country damaged by years of war. He also shares the special pitch he gives prospective faculty members.
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