Can the stock market understand for-profit higher education?

The recent New York Times article concerning difficulties at the University of Phoenix and the earlier January 28, 2007 announcement that Laureate Education, Inc. was going to be taken private (for $3.8B)seem to share an important question for for-profit higher education: Is it possible to build a long-term viable, for-profit institution of higher education that is subject to the quarterly profit-growth demands of the stock market?

Simply making a good profit is insufficient for the market, which connects its rewards to steady, and significant, profit growth.  One can easily hypothesize that some of the problems of the University of Phoenix described in the NYT article arose because of efforts to sustain profit growth beyond some limits possible or acceptable in higher education. After all, higher education operates under some significant legal and ethical constraints, and producing consistent quality in such a human-intensive endeavor is not so readily scalable as some other enterprises.   

Laureate Education, on the other hand, is essentially inventing a new approach to globalization of higher education. One can imagine that there will times when creating academic sustainability of this new global educational enterprise will require more reinvestment and less profit than the growth-focused market can understand. In fact, Becker has stated," We have not taken dividends out of any of our universities around the world. They are free to build their excess revenues and to re-invest those funds in facilities or programs that benefit our students and grow our business."(p. 42)  It is certain that academic sustainability is not the same as financial sustainability, although the two are clearly tightly linked in the case of for-profit higher education. Could this be one of the drivers behind the Laureate decision to move out of the of the market with its very short time horizon?