Growth
While to some extent for-profit colleges have always existed, their numbers exploded after 1992, when after the United States House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce created a federal regulation known as the "90-10 rule" and defined "institution of higher education" for the purposes of federal-aid eligibility as including for-profit institutions. The idea behind the 90-10 rule was that if a proprietary school's offerings were truly valuable – for example, if they filled some niche that traditional State and private non-profit educational institutions did not – then surely 10% of their students would be willing to pay completely out-of-pocket, i.e., those who fell above federal guidelines for receiving taxpayer subsidies to attend college. Traditional educational institutions routinely met this bar without even paying attention.
For-profit schools make up a small percentage of America's educational institutions, but the number of schools is growing. In February 2000, there were hundreds of thousands of students being taught at 200 for-profit postsecondary facilities, with approximately six percent of students nationally enrolled at a for-profit institution. Eduventures, a higher education research and consulting firm, states that nine percent of all U.S. college and graduate students attend for-profit institutions.
Between 1998 and 2000 a Boston-based company named Advantage Schools (since taken over by Mosaica Education) saw its revenue increase from $4 million to approximately $60 million. Between 1995 and 2000 the Edison Schools' yearly revenues grew from $12 million to $217 million. In 2000 Edison Schools projected that by 2006 it would manage about 423 schools with 260,000 students, giving it revenue of $1.8 billion.
Read more about this topic: For-profit Education
Famous quotes containing the word growth:
“For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The reality is that zero defects in products plus zero pollution plus zero risk on the job is equivalent to maximum growth of government plus zero economic growth plus runaway inflation.”
—Dixie Lee Ray (b. 1924)
“The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of human faces.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)