Achieving the (almost) impossible: Consensus on for-profit education
Sandy Baum and Jorge Klor De Alva
February 23, 2022
Few issues are more contentious than the role of for-profit colleges in higher education, write Sandy Baum and Jorge Klor de Alva. But they say consensus is both necessary—and possible.
Few issues are more contentious than the role of for-profit colleges in higher education, even in today’s polarized climate. Unscrupulous predators, or seedbeds of innovation? Poor-performing and shady, or an essential resource, particularly for less-advantaged learners? Almost no one is neutral, and the resulting political standoff has become a recurring obstacle to higher education reform.
But consensus is possible. We know because we spent the past two years in a working group that brought skeptics and defenders of for-profit colleges together to look for common ground. The challenge we set for ourselves was to develop a policy framework that could protect students and taxpayers without penalizing colleges—proprietary or not—that produce positive results for learners.
