Market Influenced Deviance in For-Profit Education

• In Event: 207 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Historical Trends and Policy Issues in Higher Education

Abstract

For-profit higher education has been a relative flashpoint in U.S. educational policy in recent years. This debate over for-profit universities, has been caused by two concurrent factors. The first being their exponential rise to prominence in recent years, especially among publicly traded universities including The University of Phoenix (parent company Apollo Group), Kaplan University, and DeVry. The second reason for increased attention and regulatory scrutiny has been a perceived threat to the fragile recovery from the 2008 U.S. economic crisis, as for-profit universities have been shown to have a high rate of default among their students and have been plagued by a long history of less than ethical business practices. It has been suggested among congressional overseers, particularly Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin, that these for-profit institutions saddle students with a debt load that their degree will not afford them the resources to repay and they do so at the expense of prudent business and academic ethical standards. If this is true, it is feared that it could lead to a future credit crisis as a result of spiking rates in student loan defaults (Devarics 2011). This analysis describes a brief narrative of for-profit education’s rise to prominence in the United States and the evolution of the regulatory frame work in which it sits. As well contributions from a variety of relevant theorists will be examined in to attempt to account for why for-profit universities have been historically plagued by accusations of impropriety and questionable business practices.

Author

• Andrew Frederick Baird, University of Central Florida