The future of for-profits
Education Dive’s list includes more than 50 for-profit colleges that closed, were acquired or consolidated since 2016. Among them are chains such as Brown Mackie College and ITT Technical Institute, which together operated more than 100 campuses across the country, meaning the count of affected locations is much higher.
The for-profit sector has been in a downward spiral since 2016, when the Obama administration increased its oversight and stripped federal recognition of the accreditor responsible for two large chains — ITT and Corinthian Colleges — whose high-profile collapses drew attention to issues of misrepresentation and poor student outcomes within the sector. That accreditor, ACICS, oversaw about 250 colleges in 2016, a figure that has since shrunk by roughly two-thirds with 61 closing and more than 100 finding new accreditors, according to a July 2018 report by the Center for American Progress.