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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

In the USA, private does not mean for-profit. The good private universities are still non-profit.

There's nothing wrong with for-profit schools in theory. It's a socio-economic problem. There's already so much money flowing through the US university system that the vast majority of for-profit schools are predatory institutions targeting lower-class, under-educated people. Their primary business model is to convince students to take out loans to pay for a white-collar education that won't make them any more employable.

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The "good private universities" may be "non-profit" in some strict sense, but in the case of the big Ivies (e.g., Harvard, my alma mater), they could be described as a hedge fund with, oh, yes, by the way, a school attached, or, alternatively, as a huge Federally-funded research institution.

The educational part seems to be a facade for the big money/big institution part.

(Bitter much? Sure. ;-)

What good is a "hedge fund" you can't take the money out of? The Ivies have massive endowments, but that money can only be spent on the school.

I went to a school like that. They provided grant-only aid to cover tuition and living expenses for students from most of the US income distribution. I think you will have a harder time finding sob stories about my classmates (at least since the no-loan policies were enacted).

> There's nothing wrong with for-profit schools in theory.

Absolutely.

The problem is our university system as it stands is now really structured for profitability. The system was originally designed to cater to wealthy students and when public universities came to be, they kept the same model, and used tax subsidies to maintain it.

An effective for-profit education system would look nothing like our current university system. But a higher education system that doesn't match our current system isn't useful for students because the majority of them are looking for degrees, not necessarily an education.

Theoretically there's nothing wrong with for-profit schools, but the current educational climate prevent them from working. For now, for-profit education really only has a place in domains that can be taught adequately in less than a year and where the student's outcome can be readily assessed.

> Their primary business model is to convince students to take out loans to pay for a white-collar education that won't make them any more employable.

I think this applies to far more schools than just private for-profits like ITT. There are many recent graduates from non-profit public schools that have mountains of debt and very little job prospects.

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