For-Profit Colleges Find New Market Niche
For-Profit Colleges Find New Market Niche
By TAMAR LEWIN - New York Times, 6/24/2010
Kaplan University has an offer for California community college students who cannot get a seat in a class they need: under a memorandum of understanding with the chancellor of the community college system, they can take the online version at Kaplan, with a 42 percent tuition discount.
The opportunity would not come cheap. Kaplan charges $216 a credit with the discount, compared with $26 a credit at California’s community colleges.
Supporters of for-profit education say the offer underscores how Kaplan and other profit-making colleges can help accommodate the mushrooming demand for higher education.
The number of California students choosing for-profit schools has been increasing rapidly, state officials say.
At the same time, government officials have become increasingly concerned that students at for-profit colleges are far more likely than those at public institutions to take out large loans — and default on them.
For better or worse, the tough times for public colleges nationwide have presented for-profit colleges with a promising marketing opportunity. “We thought, in light of the budget crisis and the number of community college classes which are being canceled, if we have that same class here, we would give students the opportunity to take it at Kaplan,” said Greg F. Marino, president of Kaplan University Group, a profit-making business owned by the Washington Post Company.
Kaplan signed the memorandum of understanding seven months ago.
In Massachusetts, Bristol Community College, which has to turn away many qualified applicants for its nursing and other courses in the health professions, has entered into a partnership with Princeton Review.
The Review, a private company, will expand the programs — and then charge $8,000 tuition, about double the regular Bristol rate.
“It will be our students, our courses, our curriculum, taught by our faculty, but Princeton Review’s going to pay some of the startup costs,” Sally Chapman Cameron, a Bristol spokeswoman, said of the two-tiered pricing plan. “Some private colleges nearby charge a lot more than Princeton Review will. Our region needs more health care workers, and without this partnership, we don’t have the resources to expand our nursing program.”
In California, the memorandum of understanding also requires each community college taking part to sign a credit-transfer agreement with Kaplan — and most of the state’s 112 community colleges are not eager to do so. Thus far, Kaplan has no takers for its courses.
“Faculty from across the state were uniformly irate and disappointed about the memorandum of understanding,” said Jane Patton, president of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, partly because faculty members were not consulted.
At the academic senate’s spring meeting, faculty members voted to urge the chancellor to withdraw from the memorandum of understanding, which they said “signaled the chancellor’s willingness to outsource the California community colleges’ mission to private for-profit entities.”