For-profit education in the USA: A primer

Abstract

For-profit higher education is not new. In fact, profit motive has played an important role in providing higher education since the Golden Age of Greece, when anyone could open up a private school and teach (Coulson 1999). Competitive for-profit education was particularly prominent in Athens, which led the city to become a beacon of learning (Coulson 1999). For-profit education was all but wiped out during the Middle Ages, but reemerged in the early Renaissance, when private instructors were hired to teach merchants the method of double-entry bookkeeping (Reigner 1959). Since the late fifteenth century, for-profit higher education has continued to develop. During the nineteenth century, well-organized for-profit business schools were founded across America and for-profit education developed into a very important form of higher education (Kinser 2006). Compelled by market forces, for-profit schools sprang up where needed to fill the educational needs of the population. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.