GeorgeGee – I don’t completely understand why you would unprovokedly attack me and take the time to look up and post those hyperlinks. I was just trying to help answer the question by trying to recall research off the top of my head I did nine months ago.
A few corrections for your researched response are in order. Don’t cite financial statements that are 15 years old. I am sure the financial landscape has changed a lot since then. Also, your example of an ivy league school doesn’t hold much water since the average school cannot charge as much in tuition as an ivy league does. Furthermore, ivy league schools in the past few years have gotten in trouble for how big their endowments are so they have been giving more grants to students who cannot afford to pay; this means less tuition money is coming in. I looked it up and Harvard has a $26 billion dollar endowment and have had talent like Mohamed El Erian (CEO of PIMCO which has $1.1 trillion in assets under management) run it. A modest return, during normal times, of 10 percent yields $2.6 billion dollars- a lot more than tuition revenue. Albeit, no school has as large of an endowment as Harvard, but most schools don’t need $2 billion to cover operating cost. Even at my high school, which was private, couldn’t run off of tuition alone- not even close actually.
I highly doubt a for-profit school is very selective like you said. They run advertisements on TV and have naming rights to a NFL stadium. Their goal is to increase sales, plain and simple. I would venture to guess an education from any four year university is going to be better than one from a for-profit. Also, no one applies to a community college, you just enroll there. You can’t compare oranges to apples.