For-Profit Higher Education and Community Colleges

The recent growth of for-profit educational providers has been one of the most watched trends in higher education (Blumenstyk, 2000; Burd, 1998; Selingo, 1999; Strosnider, 1998). Despite the widespread attention, surprisingly little concrete information exists about the for-profit phenomenon. Although the for-profit sector is not the only source of new competition in higher education, the highly publicized growth of some for-profit institutions has generated increasing anxiety among both private non-profit and public colleges and universities. To develop a better understanding of how these institutions compare to public community colleges with respect to their students and programs, the Community College Research Center joined with the National Center for Postsecondary Improvement (NCPI) to conduct a two-year study. The objective was to determine whether these two types of institutions are competitive or complementary and how community colleges have responded to the growth of the for-profits

Bureaucratization in Public Research Institutions

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the nature of bureaucratization within public research bodies and its relationship to scientific performance, focusing on an Italian case-study. The main finding is that the bureaucratization of the research sector has two dimensions: public research labs have academic bureaucratization since researchers spend an increasing part of their time in administrative matters (i.e., preparing grant applications, managing grants/projects, and so on); whereas universities mainly have administrative bureaucratization generated by the increase over time of administrative staff in comparison with researchers and faculty. In addition, I show that research units with higher bureaucratization have lower scientific performance

Academic restructuring: Organizational change and institutional imperatives

Abstract. A perennial challenge for universities and colleges is to keep pace with knowledge change by reconsidering their structural and resource commitments to various knowledge areas. Reflecting upon changes in the academic landscape of public higher education in the United States over the past quarter of a century, the author diagnoses a macro-trend whereby the dominant legitimating idea of public higher education has changed from higher education as a social institution to higher education as an industry. Three interrelated mechanisms are identified as having advanced this process: academic management, academic consumerism, and academic stratification. This pattern of academic restructuring reflects multiple institutional pressures. While public universities and colleges have increasingly come to rely on market discourse and managerial approaches in order to demonstrate responsiveness to economic exigencies, they may end up losing legitimacy as they move away from their historical character, functions, and accumulated heritage as educational institutions. Thus, responsiveness to compelling economic pressures that dominate contemporary organizational imperatives in an attempt to gain legitimacy in one dimension may result in loss for another. Wholesale adaptation to market pressures and managerial rationales could thereby subsume the discourse about the future of colleges and universities within a logic of economic rationality at a detriment to the longer-term educational legacies and democratic interests that have long characterized American public education

The formal organization of knowledge: An analysis of academic structure

Over the past two decades, higher education scholars have turned their attention to the study of knowledge legitimation, specifically the role of organizational contexts in the social construction of knowledge. Examples include the analysis of emerging fields (Boxer

For-Profit Higher Education and Community Colleges

This report addresses contemporary concerns about the competitive threat from for-profit educational institutions, contrasts national data on for-profits with national data on private non-profit and public post-secondary institutions, and examines case study data comparing a for-profit chain to three public community colleges located near branches of the chain. As a group, the for-profits are concentrated in a limited number of business and technical fields. Although they may compete with community colleges in those specific areas, the small size of the for-profit sector will limit the overall competitive effect. Moreover, some of the four-year for-profit institutions target upper division students and actively recruit community college graduates, so in this sense, these institutions are complements rather than competitors to community colleges. The authors found important differences between the two types of institutions and the community colleges may find lessons in for-profit institutions' emphasis on customer service, extensive support for employment placement, and degree completion rate