The expansion of higher education has been extraordinary. Since the Catholic University of Angola, the country's first private higher education institution, was founded in 2001, the government has recognised a further 15 private universities.
Fifteen bills including Private Universities Act and Foreign Education Providers’ Bill are pending in parliament. On the role of private players in the field, he felt that most of the courses offered were market-driven and not holistic. Private players are showing more interest in professional courses in engineering and medicine, he said.
Ask some of the most established private higher education institutions in Malaysia about their organisation’s founding principles and you will, more often than not, hear the word “philanthropy” and “giving back to society” .
Singapore’s Council for Private Education, or CPE, last week published new ground rules on responsible and truthful advertising by private education institutions, to rein in misleading or false claims and provide better protection for students turning to the growing private higher education sector.
Whilst the expansion of private higher education enrolment has had a significant impact in boosting access, these universities are relatively small and as of 2005, almost 90% of students were in Public universities and other institutes of higher learning. The Private higher education sector is, however, continually expanding and its proportion of intake can only go up.
Higher Education Authority Chairman John Hennessy said the continuing growing demand for Higher Education in Ireland could no longer be fully met by the publicly funded institutions. He said that at a time of cutbacks, and because of close links to industry, private colleges were often in a better position to deliver better programmes.
The Chairman of the Higher Education Authority, John Hennessy, has criticised the “very restrictive” public service working practices across the third-level sector. In an address yesterday he also envisaged a greater role for private colleges in the provision of higher education courses in Ireland.
Some blame the problem on for-profit universities that have proliferated in the past two decades as a reaction to increased demand for higher education. The universities, which offer as little as one degree, have earned the moniker ‘garage universities’ because they often operate from houses, where each room is a ‘faculty’.
Figures show that leading Russell Group universities spent £382 million (US$613 million) on the highest paid academics and managers last year – twice as much as in 2003-04. It also emerged that the proportion of university spending on top staff – those paid at least £100,000 a year – increased from just 1.8% to 3.8%, writes Graeme Paton for The Telegraph.
Perturbed over key higher education reform bills being stuck in parliament for more than two years, India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal last week accused private education institutions of stalling the passage of legislation that seeks to raise quality, reports The Times of India.
Chilean student leader Camila Vallejo accused Education Minister Harald Beyer of presenting a “contradiction” regarding the government’s stance on nonprofit higher education in his new higher education finance plan released on Monday.
222 of 2,181 private colleges and universities nationwide will raise their tuition rates by an average of 10 percent or P41.52 per unit when the next school year opens in June, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) said.
President Obama will sign an executive order today at a Georgia military base that will force colleges to disclose more information about financial aid and graduation rates, as well as requiring the Department of Defense to set rules for recruiting at military installations. It will also restrict the use of the term "GI Bill" in marketing and recruitment. While the order will apply to all colleges, it appears to be aimed at the for-profit sector.
The rapid growth of for-profit colleges over the past decade has been aided by billion-dollar ad campaigns on daytime television, the Internet and highway billboards across the country.
Under constant criticism allowing large-scale private universities in the state, Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal on Thursday said the government has decided to allow only 20 private universities to function in the state. The government has so far, already sanctioned 13 such universities, of which 11 are functional.
In light of weak federal regulations and lackluster completion rates at for-profit colleges, students should be armed with the kind of questions they need to ask to make sure the colleges deliver on what they promise.