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:
“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)
“But parents can be understanding and accept the more difficult stages as necessary times of growth for the child. Parents can appreciate the fact that these phases are not easy for the child to live through either; rapid growth times are hard on a child. Perhaps it’s a small comfort to know that the harder-to-live-with stages do alternate with the calmer times,so parents can count on getting periodic breaks.”
—Saf Lerman (20th century)
“A personality is an indefinite quantum of traits which is subject to constant flux, change, and growth from the birth of the individual in the world to his death. A character, on the other hand, is a fixed and definite quantum of traits which, though it may be interpreted with slight differences from age to age and actor to actor, is nevertheless in its essentials forever fixed.”
—Hubert C. Heffner (1901–1985)