Dimensions of Corporate Ownership in For-Profit Higher Education

The recent growth of for-profit higher education has been marked by the rising importance of institutional ownership by publicly traded corporations. This paper looks at 13 publicly traded corporations that own degree-granting for-profit institutions of higher education in the United States, examining corporate growth strategies and their distinctiveness as Wall Street-owned institutions. The paper concludes that these institutions are different from their independently owned peers and that corporate growth strategies suggest the importance of foreign expansion.