For profit

There is an article in this month's NYRB all about the for-profit part of the tertiary education sector in the US.

It seems that this for-profit part has been around for a long time - and presumably includes the likes of what used to be our secretarial & shorthand colleges - but has grown rapidly in recent years under the twin onslaughts of austerity and right-wing governments.

The article goes on to make the scary but tiresome to check claim that in 2009, thirty leading operators spent 17% of their budget - by which I assume the author means current cash spending - on instruction and 42% of that same budget on advertising, interest and dividends. And Mr. Clinton has done even better out of it all than our own Mr. Blair - to the tune of $17.6m for a spot of figure-heading. And this is no doubt the sort of place to which our Health Minister, Mr. Hunt, would like to lead us when he has finished with the once proud NHS.

Somewhere along the line we are also told that one of these operators managed to go bankrupt, despite the fantastic profits to be made. No doubt it was one of those old-fashioned, comfortable bankruptcies where all the assets which had been thought to be collateral turned out to be actually owned by mysterious entities in the Cayman Islands, courtesy of Messrs. T. May and T. Rex.