I have been off the blogging field for several months now while traveling to South Africa, and then working as a visiting professor at Mercer University School of Law (school colors: orange and black). I am happy to be back now, particularly at this exciting time for the blog in light of our new partnership with ELA. In the coming weeks, I have many thoughts to share comparing the legal frameworks under which academic employees and students do their work in different countries, and in different sorts of institutions within this country.
To start, I want to engage a premise that I heard repeated more than a few times at the recent ELA annual conference. The premise is that the United States "needs" for-profit higher educational institutions in order to fulfill the policy goals we have adopted as a nation. These policy goals vary depending on who states the foregoing premise, but they seem to boil down most often to getting as many people through college and out the other side as possible, and presumably doing so for as little money as possible.
My question is, am I accurately stating the premise that I heard stated at ELA? I have to confess that this premise seems to me to be implausible on its face, given the well-recognized tendency of for-profit higher educational institutions to provide less service (measured in terms of completion rates, employment outcomes, and student loan default rates) for greater cost than public and non-profit private institutions. Am I missing something? Should we be enabling this sector of the higher education world? If so, why?