It used to be simple. For decades, providers of higher education were either nonprofit (the vast majority, public or private) or for-profit, sometimes massive, like the University of Phoenix, and more commonly the nearby business or trade school.
More recently, gradations appeared. In the 2000s private investors bought and transformed struggling nonprofit institutions to capitalize on their existing accreditation. In the last few years, numerous joint ventures emerged (sometimes controversially) in which nonprofit colleges and universities teamed up with for-profit companies to create new providers that had both nonprofit and for-profit elements.
And in recent months, as regulatory scrutiny has intensified the heat on for-profit higher education, several privately financed providers have made a different kind of transition,adopting nonprofit status or becoming an emergent category of institution known as public benefit corporations, created by dozens of states to encourage companies to focus less on their bottom lines and more on societal needs.
Late last week the distinction between for-profit and nonprofit college blurred yet again, with the announcement that Alliant International University, a California nonprofit institution accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, had become the first of what are expected to be several universities becoming for-profit benefit corporations as part of a new system of health sciences institutions, Arist Education System.
It is believed to be the first regionally accredited nonprofit college to make such a move.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/23/nonprofit-university-becomes-benefit-corporation-further-blurring-profit-divide