Category Archives: Writing

Grand Canyon University, Inside Higher Education reports, has taken the unusual step of giving nearly 100 adjuncts full-time positions (“Adjunct Promotion at a For-profit“) in hopes that “having a cadre of long-term online professors will prove a competitive advantage.” It’s another sign of the ways that the for-profit industry might realign itself in the face of an increased regulatory presence.  Grand Canyon may be the first to try to reorganize by redefining the dominant casualized labor model.

In the old lax regulatory environment the schools made money simply by competing for the huge pool of students who were ignored by the public academic industrial complex. Competition without regulatory supervision led to the abuses which (finally) reawakened the regulatory political will. It remains to be seen if the emerging regulatory regime will have any teeth. Meanwhile the for-profit universities have begun to shift their focus away from the now loosing numbers game and towards building institutional capital.

It’s no small thing to get a full-time job, with benefits, in your chosen profession, in a stalled recovery. That’s a form of employment that capital seemed determined to drive off the face of the earth. On the other hand it’s a deeply paranoid model that only a control freak could love: the teachers are asked to adhere to a specific schedule (8 to 12)  and to work in  a designated work space. On yet another hand, you can organize in that sort of space in a way that was difficult if not impossible with everyone working at home…

Each of the companies has recently taken steps to reform their student-recruiting practices and reduce their dependence on federal student-aid funds. Mr. Marshall, in an interview, dismissed those moves as mostly “window dressing” that don’t deal with deeper challenges. “We don’t think the reforms are going to work,” he said. “The culture within these companies is not changing. (“Firm Says Poor Governance Puts 3 Higher-Education Companies at Risk of ‘Outright Failure‘”)

There’s more evidence this week that the fast rabbit for-profit universities (where I work) may be loosing their advantage against the slow-moving tortoises of the public sector.  This seems particularly serious, because it could impact a company’s ability to attract new investment as well as borrow money at a reasonable rate.  It also suggests the  economic dilemma that will dominate business in the next decade.

For the last two or three decades, and especially in the last decade, a clever company or university could thrive  by taking advantage of the Republican ideology that disabled regulations.  No one was watching. As the regulatory apparatus slowly and unevenly comes back to life, these companies and schools will have to adapt. The pubic schools will no doubt survive but some for-profits may well go out of business.

The line between public and for-profit is blurry, though, and neither side has a monopoly on ethics or effective governance. The for-profits are so reliant on public money they are arguably not really private at all. That’s why the emerging regulatory system is going to have such an impact. And many of the public universities, like Penn State, are as corrupt and greedy as anything on Wall Street.