The economics of for-profit education

Abstract

For-profit higher education has grown rapidly in the United States over the last 20 years. Examples include vocational schools, technical training, in-house corporate education, the DeVry Institute, Phoenix University, and other new for-profit colleges. In addition, a number of developing countries, most prominently the Philippines, have experimented with for-profit higher education in the past. Adam Smith, writing in 1776, associated for-profit education with high levels of instructional quality, and claimed that endowed, nonprofit education resulted in shirking and poor teaching. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.