Senate committee issues scathing report on for-profit colleges

A two-year Senate investigation of the for-profit higher education industry has found it is doing little to serve students or taxpayers.

The report, ‘Emerging Risk?: An Overview of Growth, Spending, Student Debt and Unanswered Questions in For-Profit Higher Education’, was released on 30 July by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee. It found that while enrolment has grown dramatically over the past decade, making the schools highly profitable, they were far more expensive than comparable programmes at community colleges or public universities, ran over-zealous or misleading advertising campaigns and over 50 per cent of students dropped out.