Compare and Contrat Paper on For-Profit and Traditional Colleges - Essay Example

FPCUs, apart from providing education, are founded on profit making motives thus are run like businesses, charging fees to all students they enroll. The FPCUs emerged to address some of inadequacies facing the traditional universities and colleges due emerging trends in education and increased need for higher education. By 2007, in America, the FPCUs were educating over two million students each year, already having penetrated the minds of students and the community through extensive marketing campaigns and directional signs indicating their location (Hentschke et al 1).

Currently, most of the societal segments are very empowered on the role of post secondary education in increasing chances for getting a job, increasing income and improving the standards of life thus more people would like to pursue postsecondary education increasing it demand. This situation is more of a business opportunity, which for profit enterprises are more likely to respond to unlike the public and private nonprofit entities (Hentschke et al 1). The for profit entities respond to these opportunities by offering college and university education in a business model environment run as corporations or individual businesses.

These ventures are providing solution to nontraditional students by offering them training in specific roles in varied occupational fields having been previously not well served by the traditional colleges and universities. Reasons for emergence of FPCUs from traditional colleges and universities Several factors have fuelled emergence of FPCUs from traditional colleges and universities (TCUs) including: revenue pressure, academic reputation, Social Consciousness and Diversity, and management.

Revenue pressure In America, the public support per student has stagnated while the real cost of providing college education per student continues to grow, pressurizing the institutions to raise revenue by increasing fees amount per student (Berg 16). Increased cost of education increases the number students in need of low cost education thus the TCUs are forced to make aggressive recruitment aimed at increasing revenue. With this strategy in place, the TCUs start embracing business ideas of marketing.

In addition, the TCUs form alliances with private sector and businesses in order to generate enough revenues to sustain their programs, which make universities to put more efforts on efficiency and commercializing it activities. With commercialization efforts, profit eventually motives crop, leading to transformation to FPCUs. Academic reputation Maintaining and improving academic reputation is the ultimate goal of any academic institution. Efforts to maintain academic reputation are challenged by the changing demographics of the population served, competition, maintaining identity and fighting elitism (Berg 20).

To maintain the reputation, institutions have to be more competitive by marketing themselves. This puts pressure on TCUs, forcing them to seek commercial options, leading to emergence of profit motives and creating room for FPCUs. Social Consciousness and Diversity In offering college education, diversity leading to equal opportunity has always been a challenge with TCUs. This has been mainly due to traditional preoccupations with ethnic reflection in the student body and the