Education Dive covers a recent report by the Council for Aid to Education which used it’s Collegiate Learning Assessment tool to answer two questions:

  • Do students who attend proprietary institutions achieve student learning outcomes similar to comparable students who attend comparable non-proprietary institutions?
  • Is there a difference in growth in learning exhibited by comparable students at proprietary versus non-proprietary institutions?

The analysis compared the performance of students at four proprietary schools with the performance of students at 20 similar non-proprietary public and non-for-profit institutions. The findings, quoted from the report were:

This study shows that there are no statistically significant differences between students at proprietary and nonproprietary institutions with respect to their academic outcomes, as measured by CLA+. The one exception was the scores of seniors on the Performance Task in which case, students at proprietary institutions outperformed students at non-proprietary institutions by a small margin. The study also shows that there is no difference in growth exhibited by students in either group. The effect sizes were almost identical. Additionally, while the value added scores were slightly better for proprietary institutions, this group difference was not statistically significant.

A link to the article from Education Dive is below or you can find the full report here.

Report: Some for-profit students outperform peers from traditional institutions