Kaplan CEO Andrew Rosen argues that the current crisis provides an opportunity to place questions of student learning, innovation and cost containment at the center of higher education reform debates, and that policymakers can look to for-profit colleges for key lessons about how to retool postsecondary education to reflect new priorities.

Given the tight fiscal environment, it is critical that policymakers have a solid grasp on how to think about college costs and accountability so that they will be prepared to make important decisions about budget cuts and higher education policy in the years ahead.

Community colleges are subsidized through direct state and local government appropriations and through student grant programs. Every student who drops out represents an investment loss by the taxpayers in that student's uncompleted education.

Once little more than a blip on the radar of American higher education, for-profit colleges now enroll about 1 in 10 of the nation’s postsecondary students. And this fast growth has not gone unremarked. The past year has brought unprecedented scrutiny and often harsh criticism of proprietary education from policy makers, regulators, and the news media.

What challenges and opportunities surround the push to make American higher education more productive?

The observations and experiences of interviewees who have worked in both for-profit and not-for-profit higher education suggest that traditional colleges and universities will be badly mistaken if they assume that the travails of for-profits today mean that useful lessons cannot be drawn from their successes to date—and those likely to occur in the future.

This volume provides insightful analysis that legislators, administrators, and consumers can use to engage institutions of higher education in the difficult but necessary conversation of accountability.