A brief from the Institute for Higher Education Policy suggests that low-income and minority students are increasingly over-represented at for-profit colleges.
The brief, A Portrait of Low-Income Adults in Education, is the latest in a series of IHEP reports that offer snapshots of the status of low-income students in higher education.
IHEP found that 19 percent of low-income students are enrolled in for-profit institutions. That’s up from 13 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, only 15 percent of these students are enrolled in public institutions, down from 20 percent. Low-income minority women also are three times as likely to enroll in for-profit colleges.
Still, though low-income students are overrepresented at for-profits, most of these students still attend public colleges.
In her June 7 testimony to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Pauline Abernathy, vice president of the Institute for College Access & Success, noted that most low-income and minority students—as much as 78 percent—attend public or nonprofit schools.
“While most low-income and underrepresented minority students attend public colleges, these students are also heavily recruited by many career colleges, where they enroll disproportionately and in growing numbers,” she said.
It was not surprising to find that low-income students chose to attend for-profits, says Michelle Asha Cooper, president of IHEP. But what did surprise her, she says, was the “magnitude” of the extent to which students were defecting to these schools.
