Lessons From the Edge: For-Profit and Nontraditional Higher Education in America

The importance of for-profit higher education becomes clear when one examines the state of higher education today. Traditional institutions are facing major pressures, including diminishing financial support, a call to serve adult learners, the need to balance applied and liberal arts curricula, and the need to maintain and evolve the institutional mission. Stakeholders are more numerous than ever before, and they are pulling institutions in different directions. Traditional higher education institutions are increasingly pressured to alter the their missions because diminished public funding has resulted in dependence on donors and corporations with varied interests. This strain is causing universities to behave in new ways. For-profit institutions provide a model of how to handle these challenges by their very structure--they are organized to operate professionally as a business and continually question and refine their organizational mission. They are constructed specifically to meet the needs of adult learners, and the core of their mission--to help adult and traditionally underserved students--is constant and clear.

The importance of for-profit higher education becomes clear when one examines the state of higher education today. Traditional institutions are facing major pressures, including diminishing financial support, a call to serve adult learners, the need to balance applied and liberal arts curricula, and the need to maintain and evolve the institutional mission. Stakeholders are more numerous than ever before, and they are pulling institutions in different directions. Traditional higher education institutions are increasingly pressured to alter the their missions because diminished public funding has resulted in dependence on donors and corporations with varied interests. This strain is causing universities to behave in new ways. For-profit institutions provide a model of how to handle these challenges by their very structure--they are organized to operate professionally as a business and continually question and refine their organizational mission. They are constructed specifically to meet the needs of adult learners, and the core of their mission--to help adult and traditionally underserved students--is constant and clear.

This book grew out of research linked to the Good Work Higher Education Project, which, since 1995, has been investigating how individuals are able to carry out good work in their chosen professions when conditions are changing at unprecedented rates. Good work is work that is at once of high quality, socially responsible, and fulfilling to the worker. Berg argues in this book that good work by this definition is occurring at nontraditional institutions, including some of the for-profits.