THERE used to be three near-certainties about higher education. It was supplied on a national basis, mostly to local students. It was government-regulated. And competition and profit were almost unknown concepts. As most education was publicly funded, the state had a big say in what was taught, to how many and for how long. Insofar as it existed at all, competition was a gentlemanly business; few educators thought much about customers, fewer about profit.
Only one message will have reached most of the public from Sir Andrew Foster's report on further education: that a significant (but unspecified) proportion of colleges are failing and should be taken over by private providers. Not surprisingly for a 113-page assessment of an entire sector, the real verdict is much more complex and generally more sympathetic to the colleges. Sir Andrew blames successive governments for giving further education too wide a brief, confusing employers and students while spreading resources too thinly. He suggests that higher education courses are among the distractions, and he advocates a model closer to the American community college. Sir Andrew Foster
A physician plans to open what will become Britain's first privately financed medical school since the 19th century, promising to train doctors in about half the time it takes at one of the nation'...
Hoping to improve access to higher education, Brazil is giving tax incentives to private universities that provide scholarships to needy students, with added incentives for those who are indigenous or Afro-Brazilian. Such people are far less likely to attend Brazilian universities than white students are.
A new campus rises almost every week, but critics worry that some may be 'junk universities' With its endless expanse of bleak, cinder-block tenements, this city north of the Mexican capital seems an unlikely setting for a business success story.
Maxie Burch knew something was wrong when his campus e-mail account stopped working one recent morning. Then a maintenance man showed up to change the locks on his office door at Grand Canyon University, where the associate professor of Christian studies had taught for eight years. At 3:30 that afternoon, two security guards and a university official arrived to escort him from the campus.
The Career Education Corporation, one of the country's biggest for-profit higher-education companies, disclosed last month that the U.S. Department of Education had put a freeze on approving new applications for additional campuses or acquisitions while it examines the company's financial records and compliance with federal student-aid regulations.
For-profit higher education has continued to grow at a pace that once seemed unsustainable, thanks to an influx of capital, a favorable regulatory climate, and the industry's own nimble reaction to the changing demands of students.
The Education Department of the State of New York is clamping down on a fast-growing for-profit college that specializes in recruiting financially needy students who haven't graduated from high school.
In an apparent first, the for-profit higher-education industry has begun collecting data on the salaries of its college administrators. Last month, at the Career College Association's annual meeting here, it released some of the initial findings -- with some strong caveats.