A growing number of Brazilians are willing to pay to get an education, and for-profit schools, both local and international, are rushing to oblige them.
Senior academics in the UCU lecturers' union have said they fear expansion of for-profit universities could damage the reputation of higher education in the UK
One of Britain's best-known public intellectuals took higher-education observers by surprise on Sunday with the announcement that he is spearheading the establishment of what would be an unprecedented kind of institution in Britain—a private, for-profit liberal-arts college that would rival elite institutions such as the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.
The establishment of a new private liberal-arts college in London, which was announced to widespread media coverage on Sunday, appears to have already hit several significant hurdles. A.C. Grayling, a well-known philosopher and the driving force behind the New College of the Humanities, had said in an introduction to the institution posted on its Web site that its students would have access to many resources at the University of London, including its libraries. However, in a statement, the University of London said that there was “no formal agreement between the University of London and the NCH concerning academic matters” and that there was not yet any agreement “regarding access to the Senate House Libraries by NCH students.”
The only for-profit institution in Britain authorized to offer higher-education degrees is in talks with several public universities about managing the business side of their operations, according to the Guardian. The company, BPP, “has launched an aggressive expansion plan to jointly run at least 10 of its publicly funded counterparts,” the paper reports.