What's An University For? A View from For-Profit Corner
The issues surrounding For-Profit institutions have been contested around whether allowing For-Profits inevitably means profiteering, and given the prospect of students taking loans to go to For-Profit institutions, profiteering at the taxpayers’ expense. On the other hand, For-Profit institutions argued their case as the ones driving educational innovations in cost and delivery, challenging the status quo in Higher Education, which has, they claimed, failed to change with time. These battles over entitlements, however, should be seen in the context of a broader debate about what the universities are for. Collini (2012) defines the ‘modern university’ with the following four characteristics: “1. That it provides some form of Post-secondary-school education, where education signals something more than professional training. 2. That it furthers some form of advanced scholarship or research whose character is not wholly dictated by the need to solve the immediate practical pr...