In a comment to my post on the new Digital Learning Compass report covering distance education enrollment trends for US higher education, Richard Garrett, Chief Research Officer at Eduventures and Director at The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, asked an interesting question.
I’d welcome your view on a related issue I’ve been wrestling with, namely how to treat for-profit institutions with significant numbers of online students that are now nonprofit. A number made such a conversion in the fall 2012-15 period, and more are to come (e.g. the EDMC and Kaplan announcements). In your study, did you use institutional control for the year concerned or continue to treat former for-profits as such? If the former, then I think it is worth pointing out that some of the private nonprofit growth, and for-profit decline, is due to control conversion.
With all of the news around for-profit changes, include Corinthian Colleges, ITT, Kaplan University, DeVry rebranding, I thought it would be worth addressing this question in a new post instead of just in the comments as I suspect others may have the same question.
tl;dr – There has been no material effect of these institutional control changes for the periods covered in the DL Compass report (Fall 2012 through Fall 2015). (more…)