The Private Sector Role in Global Higher Education

Doug Lederman, in Inside Higher Ed, writes about a recent three-day meeting "sponsored by the International Finance Corporation, a World Bank agency that aims to build the private sector in developing countries." In the first day of the conference, sponsored by the International Finance Corporation, a World Bank agency that aims to build the private sector in developing countries, Doug Becker, who heads a $B company - Laureate Education, Inc. - which has 70 campuses in 17 countries, noted that he sees:

an international landscape in which demand for higher education among 18- to 24-year-olds is growing by 10 percent a year, drawing ever more institutions into the market seeking to meet the burgeoning demand that countries’ government cannot. Gone, he said, are the days when would-be providers of private higher education were satisfied creating vocational schools; and with the heightened ambition of those institutions has sometimes come more scrutiny and suspicion.