Sarah E. Turner and Brian Pusser

Watch the wind in for-profit colleges' sails

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By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK

Sarah E. Turner and Brian Pusser are best known for their research on the growing political and economic influence of for-profit colleges, a result of their work through the Curry School's Center for the Study of Higher Education, a program that David W. Breneman, the dean, spearheads.

Yet for both of them, the focus was almost accidental.

For Mr. Pusser, for-profit higher education became a point of interest when he began to see the institutions as new and effective players on the political stage. During his graduate studies in political science, he and an associate professor in the education school, Patricia J. Gumport, had documented the ways that shifting patterns of state support for higher education reflected political priorities. Before long, he began to realize that new players were changing the dynamics of the education marketplace.

"The rise of for-profits is a sign of shifting subsidy patterns," he says, noting that for-profit colleges began enjoying their ascendancy in the late 1990s, at the same time that state financial support for public colleges had begun to wane. As a result, he says, tuition at public colleges is going up and "the spread has narrowed" between the cost of attending a for-profit versus a state college.

The question he finds compelling is, What are the politics of this shift?

To answer it, he has recently begun to study the lobbying practices of higher-education companies and other factors that have helped them gain political clout.

Mr. Pusser draws on an image of boats under sail in the San Francisco Bay to explain his basic hypothesis of how institutions like the University of Phoenix succeed. "Sailboats don't make the wind blow," but good sailors know how to use it, he says. "The University of Phoenix is a big boat out there on the water. It's enormously effective, but it's caught a good breeze" and has stepped in aggressively at a time when public colleges were constrained.

He adds: "The wind is what is really interesting to me right now."

Ms. Turner says her interest in for-profit colleges was piqued by their use of federal financial aid, which she learned about in a book she picked up during her first year of graduate school, Keeping College Affordable (Brookings Institution Press, 1991).

She still remembers one table that showed that students in for-profit institutions were receiving 27 percent of all Pell Grant funds. Even recognizing that the percentage was inflated by a number of disreputable institutions, many of which were shut down in the 1990s, she still finds it remarkable that the companies were capturing such a large share of the available grants. Already intrigued by the role of financial aid as an incentive, she says she realized that if the colleges were receiving such a large share of Pell Grant pie, "perhaps we should know something about the behavior of these institutions."

Focusing less on politics than Mr. Pusser, Ms. Turner sees the success of for-profit institutions and the difficulties of public colleges through an economist's eye, viewing the for-profit colleges as nimble suppliers in a market where public colleges became constrained as their state support shrinks. "For-profits are much more flexible to expand their capacity to meet this demand," she says. For-profit colleges have, for instance, pounced on the labor-market need for more nurses and more teachers by adding programs in those fields.

Recently, her interest in incentives has expanded to include the effectiveness of elite colleges' efforts to attract low-income students through recruitment campaigns, financial-aid packages, and outreach programs. She has started by looking at a program at her own university called AccessUVa. As with her work on Pell Grants, the idea is to examine each of the incentives and see which, if any, make a difference -- and why.