State Rep. Leon Stavrinakis says quality and affordability are the two main goals for South Carolina’s higher-education institutions, and the company poised to buy the Charleston School of Law doesn’t appear to strive to meet either.
Grand Canyon University was bustling with activity on the second day of classes last week, with an on-campus student population now approaching 8,500, new dormitories and an athletic program ready to launch its first year in NCAA Division I as a member of the Western Athletic Conference.
For-profit schools — which include the University of Phoenix, DeVry University and Strayer University — began booming in the 1990s after changes in state and federal regulations made it possible for them to open campuses across the country and online.
A drop in tuition at nearby private universities has led to increasing enrollment patterns, whereas state-owned universities are hiking tuition prices while experiencing smaller enrollments.
Generous tuition discounts and aggressive recruitment campaigns are netting record freshman enrollments at some private universities in Western Pennsylvania while lower-cost, state-owned universities struggle.
U.S. private colleges and universities largely fall into two categories: those with diverse revenue streams supplemented by robust research, healthcare and fundraising, and those highly dependent on student-generated revenues, according to a new Fitch Ratings report.
A $250 million donation to Centre College won’t happen, and it’s a bit unclear why. College officials and the head of a Bermuda-based trust offered differing accounts Monday of the massive deal’s sudden collapse.
Students at for-profit medical schools in the Caribbean are amassing more debt than their peers at medical schools in the United States, and many of those students quit school early, thereby creating risk for taxpayers, according to an article in Bloomberg Markets magazine that examines trends at the Caribbean institutions. Some of those schools also pay hospitals in the United States to take their students for clinical training, a practice that has drawn the ire of some medical educators.
William Peace University, an 800-student liberal arts college in North Carolina, plans to spend as much as two-thirds of its endowment on a single piece of property.
Gov. Pat Quinn awarded Columbia $4.8 million July 31 to reimburse the college for previously completed construction projects, thus allowing it to move forward with new projects.
According to a study by Affordable Colleges Online, just one percent of the private colleges in the U.S. have a documented million-dollar return on investment (ROI): alumni whose lifetime earnings surpass those of non-degree holders by seven figures. The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) is among that select group, with an estimated $1.62 million return after taking into account tuition and fees. That figure ranks as the third highest in the nation.
The number of American college students has fallen below 20 million for the first time since the late recession. Is this the first wave of the threatened collapse in traditional college attendance that is supposed to drive small private colleges out of business?
Generous tuition discounts and aggressive recruitment campaigns are netting record freshman enrollments at some private universities in Western Pennsylvania while lower-cost, state-owned universities struggle.
A new survey of 523 college presidents has been completed by Gallup and Inside Higher Ed, and the findings are interesting. All the questions and answers from the Gallup/Inside Higher Ed Presidents' Panel can be viewed here, but one fascinating takeaway is that there are big differences in college presidents’ perception of the board that depend on whether the institution is public or private:
Founded in 1995, Corinthian is one of the world's largest for-profit college companies, with an enrollment of about 81,000 students at 111 schools in 25 states and Canada. Operating under the names Everest, Heald and WyoTech, it offers job-training programs as well as associate's, bachelor's and master's degrees.
From my story today: “As the Education Department gathers a panel to rewrite controversial for-profit college regulations, the motto might as well be 'the more things change, the more they stay the same.'
For-profit colleges enjoy the fruits of a business model to die for. It's not a new model. In fact, it's very similar to the one employed by subprime mortgage purveyors Washington Mutual and Countrywide Financial that helped put the entire global financial system at risk, pitching the U.S. into the worst financial panic since the Depression. As we confront a national student loan debt now over $1 trillion and counting, that holds back their "normal" investment in first-time housing, cars and the like, it would be wise to look closely at those similarities and see what we can do about them before its too late (again).
Some students in the Inland Empire have complained in recent years that the education and degrees they receive from some area for-profit colleges leave them unemployable in their fields of interest and facing mounds of student loan debt.