Perceptions of a moving target: how for-profit higher education is viewed globally

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel responds to the conference’s theme through the in-dept discussion about a higher education sector that has been the subject of great controversy worldwide regarding its contribution to the sustainability of education system, i.e. for-profit private higher education (PHE). For-profit PHE’s two main claims to education sustainability lie first in expanding access and, second, in being responsive to the real-world needs of students. Critics, on the other hand, find the access attraction largely based on falsehoods and deception, failing to provide an education that serves student purposes rather than owners’ profit purposes.
This panel benefits from the recent fast-growing volume of PHE studies generally and for-profit studies specifically. Quantitatively, the first dataset on global PHE, developed by PROPHE (PROPHE, 2018; Levy, 2018), allows us to confirm a highly-cited statement written in 1999 (Altbach, 1999), that PHE is among the fastest growing part of post-secondary education. Data-driven work on for-profit specifically has been more limited by importantly growing (e.g. Kinser and Levy, 2006) and numerous case studies (e.g., for the US, see Kinser, 2006; for Brazil, see Salto, 2018) that have revealed the growingly widespread emergence of for-profit higher education institutions on the global scale. In some countries, PHE consists largely of for-profits (Levy, 2010). In some others like the US, for-profits were for a while the fastest-growing sector in higher education system. All in all, these recent studies have indirectly led many scholars to the question that how, or how much, our understanding of the above-mentioned social contributions of PHE needs to be modified due to the discovery of the for-profits.
Despite many recent studies, the fast-growing nature of this sector, as this panel points out, has made it a moving target, thus the research is still incomplete, and the findings preliminary. The panel looks into how for-profits have been studied in different contexts, from the US to Brazil and Vietnam. It is fascinating that Vietnam’s PHE is virtually for-profit, while in the US, the for-profit sector, having faced with unfavorable conditions under the Obama administration, has now become a very partisan issue. In Brazil, this sector is much more widely accepted. Kinser’s paper is seminal in that it reviews almost a decade of literature on by far the most studied case of for-profit PHE – the US – with a focus on aspects like accreditation and quality, business model, employment, attendance, financial aid and legal environment. One main conclusion drawn from the paper is that for-profits are significantly responsive to legal regulations, which makes them a moving target. Chau’s paper, through the case of Vietnamese PHE, both confirms and extends the influence of legal regulations on the for-profit sector by presenting an extreme: Vietnamese for-profit PHE was legalized and banned within only six months. Salto’s paper, on the one hand, continues the discussion on regulation by arguing that the impressive growth of Brazilian for-profits was largely attributed to the central planning and financial support by the government. On the other hand, like Kinser, Salto challenges widespread assumptions on for-profit PHE, especially the quality assumption. His paper shows that contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is very little difference in quality between publics, nonprofits and for-profits. The last paper by Hoang takes up on this line of analysis and challenges the commonly assumed distinctiveness between publics and PHE, especially the for-profit PHE. She shows that in the case of Vietnam, the borderline between publics and privates – in contemporary Vietnam, all privates are for-profits – has become blurred in term of program offerings and funding sources.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Kevin Kinser, Penn State University

Individual Presentations

• Assessing a Moving Target: Research on For-Profit Higher Education in the United States - Kevin Kinser, Penn State University

• Twists between legalizing and banning for-profit private higher education: Vietnam as a pendulum state - Quang Duong Chau, State University of New York at Albany

• The ascendancy of for-profit higher education in Brazil: just a matter of quantity? - Dante J Salto, National Scientific and Technical Research Council / National University of Cordoba

• Privatization and Public – Private Delineation: Areas of blurriness and distinctiveness in Vietnamese Universities - Lan Hoang, State University of New York at Albany

Discussant

• Daniel C. Levy, State University of New York at Albany