Education firms Anhanguera Educacional Participacoes SA and Kroton Educacional SA were added to Brazil's benchmark Ibovespa stock index for the period between Sept. 2 of this year and Jan. 3, 2014, exchange operator BM&FBovespa said on Monday.
For-profit schools — which include the University of Phoenix, DeVry University and Strayer University — began booming in the 1990s after changes in state and federal regulations made it possible for them to open campuses across the country and online.
Students at for-profit medical schools in the Caribbean are amassing more debt than their peers at medical schools in the United States, and many of those students quit school early, thereby creating risk for taxpayers, according to an article in Bloomberg Markets magazine that examines trends at the Caribbean institutions. Some of those schools also pay hospitals in the United States to take their students for clinical training, a practice that has drawn the ire of some medical educators.
Brazil has the world's 7th largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with a population of around 195 million inhabitants, distributed in 27 states (more than five thousand cities). The country has a peculiar higher education system, with a relatively small number of public research universities and a large number of private institutions, both philanthropic and for-profit. Although the system has been growing substantially in the last 15 years, the number of young people attending the university has not exceeded 14% of the 18-25 age cohort eligible to pursue university level study. Approximately 6 million students attend a higher education institution in Brazil— 75% of these students are enrolled in private institutions (approximately half of them are for-profit institutions).