Andrew Kelly on College, Inc

Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute has an excellent piece on the shortcomings of the PBS documentary, College, Inc. He identifies 4 key areas that the film failed to capture:

1. outside of a few stories about students who were bilked out of their money and given a shoddy education, the documentary says very little about how for-profits have rethought the core business of most colleges and universities---the teaching and learning of undergraduates.

2. the documentary seems to suggest that for-profit schools are subject to less accountability than traditional colleges and universities, and that these institutions should be subjected to additional regulatory burdens because of their profit motive...Many non-profit colleges and universities, some of which are of exceptionally low quality, also reap benefits from billions in federal aid; but, outside of the restrictions inherent in their tax status and some licensure requirements that vary across states, they are rarely subject to much more stringent accountability measures than these for-profit institutions

3. Martin and his interviewees often discuss the cost of for-profits, their spending on marketing and recruitment, and how the "costs" of for-profit often accrue to the "taxpayer." Clearly, these for-profits benefit from public money, and their tuitions are almost always greater than their public four-year and two-year counterparts...What this discussion ignores, however, is that the true "cost" of public community colleges to "the taxpayer" is much larger than the cost to the individual community college student because of the state subsidies that are "baked into" public colleges' operating budgets. In other words, public four year and community colleges do not charge tuition that equals what it actually costs to educate their students, because public subsidies make up the difference

Kelly continues:

Like most business ventures, for-profit colleges are filling a void that existing providers are leaving open. As Smith points out in the documentary, community colleges are unable, or perhaps unwilling, to fill this demand themselves.

these traditional institutions, and their four year brethren, have shown little inclination to search for innovative ways to serve more students and leverage their best faculty by harnessing technology. The for-profits have done so with gusto, and may provide lessons to these traditional institutions on how they might create and implement such practices.

There are multiple messages to take away from College, Inc, but one is more subtle than the others. When it comes to making the case for the niche they fill, the for-profit colleges and universities must be more proactive about showing us that they do add to the common good, and they must be more transparent about how they do so.

Opening up their data on student success, internal operations, and instructional innovation to outside researchers would help to close this credibility gap. At the end of the day, whether these institutions are good for higher education, and what might make them good, is an empirical question, and one that we should answer before jumping to hasty conclusions.