When Mark Pelesh speaks to legislators on behalf of his for-profit education company, Corinthian Colleges, he is often surprised at their resistance to the underlying concept. Many are “skeptical if not completely hostile to the idea that for-profit and education belong in the same sentence,” he said.
Speaking at a July workshop for state legislators in Atlanta, Pelesh sounded frustrated. He can’t understand how influential people can fail to see that companies like his are fulfilling the mission of access that traditional schools claim to be following, but do not.
Pelesh is an executive vice president of Corinthian, a publicly traded company that has 85,000 students and reaches a racially diverse population of working adults, many of whom have low incomes. The students’ completion rate is 60 to 70 percent, and the placement rate for its graduates is 80 percent. Community colleges, he said, have completion rates of about 25 per cent.
Yet skeptics disparage Corinthian’s role in helping these students improve their lives; they treat for-profit schools as if they are fraudulent diploma mills.
Pelesh was one of three speakers at a workshop at the annual meeting of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council). ALEC is a membership organization composed of conservative state legislators and private-sector businesses and nonprofits. At this session, moderated by Vicky Murray of the Pacific Research Institute, the speakers also included Randy Best of Higher Ed Holdings and economist Richard Vedder.
Their aim was to reduce the hostility to for-profits — and win some friends.
Pelesh gave an overview of Corinthian, one of the largest for-profit colleges in the country. (It also has campuses in Canada). Corinthian provides mostly short-term (one- to- two-year) degrees in health care, trades, transportation, criminal justice, and business. Four percent of its programs are bachelor’s degree programs.
Its schools (Everest Institute and Everest College are the best-known brand names) are accredited by national organizations such as the Accrediting Council for Independent Schools and Colleges (ACISC).
Because they started as accreditors of “commercial” programs, rather than traditional four-year colleges, these national accreditors lack the tony reputation held by regional accreditors, such as the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities (SACS). Yet Pelesh pointed out that national accreditors set minimum quantitative standards — the regional accreditors do not — and they have advisory committees composed of employers, who can judge the value of student learning.
Randy Best is a longtime entrepreneur who heads Higher Ed Holdings (HEH). His company works primarily with traditional universities, including Lamar University and Arkansas State. Using online technology, the company provides the schools’ reach to “high-need, underserved markets.” Best says he is providing access to schools that would have turned down many of these students because they don’t have enough space — or else would never have received an application from them.
As Best sees it, many state universities have abandoned their mission of outreach in favor of becoming as exclusive as possible; they view their self-erected barriers to education as “virtues.” In addition, they have moved toward research at the expense of teaching.
Panelist Richard Vedder did not mince words during his speech. He lambasted traditional academia for stagnating while the for-profit sector flourishes. He accused nonprofit and state universities of being “highly inefficient” and “quasi-monopolists” and called their leadership “affluent, arrogant, and elitist.”
Vedder is an economics professor at Ohio University and author of a book on higher education, Going Broke by Degree. He has championed for-profits in the past. To Vedder, the secret of for-profits’ success is their “enormous incentives to provide services at the lowest possible cost for any given level of quality.”
Jane S. Shaw is the president of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh (popecenter.org).