Does the future of higher education belong to the for-profit sector?

My friend Joe Duffey very kindly called to my attention a very interesting article that I had somehow missed in Change Magazine.   It is  A Tectonic Shift in Global Higher Education, by John Daniel, Asha Kanwar, and Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic.  Sir John Daniel is a person of wide experience in higher education, having headed Laurentian University and the Open University, and served as assistant director-general for education at NATO.  When he co-authors an article predicting a “Tectonic Shift” in higher education, it deserves some attention.

The authors point out that the number of higher education students worldwide is growing much more rapidly than was predicted, and will probably reach 120 million by 2010.  Not surprisingly, this growth is centered in developing countries.  For example, China passed the US in number of students enrolled in higher ed in 2005, and Malaysia plans to increase enrollments almost three-fold in the next four years.  This anticipated growth will require resources beyond those that developing countries can afford, and they will have to look for new approaches to the provision of higher education.  The authors point out that “developing countries will soon account for the majority of enrollments in higher education worldwide”, and that therefore the approaches adopted by these countries “will effectively define the global profile of higher education in the 21st century.” Daniel et al argue that the most likely provider - and therefore the group that most impacts the evolving global profile of higher education - will turn out to be for-profit higher education.