How to fix the higher education bubble? Imitate for-profit colleges

What's going on in Massachusetts? Bay Staters are fighting the higher education bubble, that's what's happening.

The Boston Globe explains:

Not even joblessness seems enough to push some residents into Massachusetts's community colleges. Of people who took advantage of training benefits while unemployed in 2010 – the last year for which the figure is available – only 11 percent chose community colleges. The rest opted for traditional universities or proprietary schools, such as the University of Phoenix.

Those for-profit schools may be criticized, but they are indisputably better than conventional higher education at providing what students increasingly want – accelerated study at convenient times and places that is geared toward landing a job. Students can start their programs at proprietary schools on almost any given Monday, for example, and not have to wait for the next semester to roll around at a community college. "If you lose a job today, you can’t wait till August to go to college," says Mark Brenner, spokesman for the Apollo Group, whose University of Phoenix reports a 170 percent increase in enrollment in Massachusetts in the past 10 years. Federal figures show that an estimated 8 percent of college and university students in Massachusetts are now in private, for-profit schools.

That may not seem like a lot, 8 percent, but earlier in the same article, the Globe rightly calls Massachusetts, "the world capital of higher education." There is no shortage of traditional colleges there.

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It's not just community colleges that have to change, [Boston Foundation president Paul] Grogan says. But they are easier to transform than long-established, fiercely independent private four-year universities and colleges over which the state has no real control. "That's why the community college reform makes all the sense in the world," he says. "Because you can move it and counter the inertia of these institutions."

But by reforming, not-for-profit colleges will be mimicking what schools like the University of Phoenix are already succeeding at during these challenging times.

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