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Too Big To Fail: The Role of For-Profit Colleges and Universities in American Higher Education

27 A lthough for-profit colleges and universities have had a long history in the United States, they have garnered significant attention only in the last decade. In the early 20th century, career colleges existed primarily in urban areas to provide training for specific trades or professions—plumbing, restaurant management, art and design, cosmetology, paralegal work, and the like. These institutions were largely small institutions that offered a few classes in rented buildings. They charged relatively low fees to their customers, who in turn learned specific skills that led directly to jobs. Even in the 1960s, career colleges were still a microscopic part of the higher education universe. In 1967 approximately seven million students attended degree-granting institutions in the United States, and fewer than 22,000 of these students, or less than one-third of 1 percent, attended for-profit institutions. Indeed, the term “for-profit college” was not generally employed; instead they were called “career” and “technical” colleges. For the next few decades, these institutions remained privately owned and largely operated below higher education’s radar screen. They were mostly unaccredited, seeking neither federal nor state financing. The situation began to change with the founding of the University of Phoenix in 1976—now America’s second largest postsecondary institution, with over 400,000 students. Today, the mom-and-pop career shops of a half century ago still exist, but they are swamped by Phoenix and other publicly traded entities such as Corinthian Colleges Inc. and DeVry University, with over 80,000 students each. This history is captured in the development of one of the more well-known early career colleges, the Katherine Gibbs School. Founded in 1911 in Providence, Rhode Island, it originally provided secretarial training to young women. The school eventually developed into a chain of successful career colleges on the Eastern seaboard that taught skills such as typing, stenography, and how to comport oneself in a business setting. In 1997 the Career Education Corporation, a gigantic for-profit, bought the Katherine Gibbs Schools. Phoenix and other institutions began to experiment with the meaning and purpose of higher education in a number of ways. Part-time working adults were not simply the main focus of the institutions—they were seen as a potentially huge customer base that traditional higher education had either ignored or disdained. These students did not need a campus and the related accoutrements—fitness and student centers, athletics, and so on. Rather than a smörgåsbord of courses whose utility for future work was not apparent, students took a finite number of classes, offered at convenient times and in