For-profits and charters growing, private schools declining, report says

New education statistics were unveiled Thursday that show big changes in for-profit education, charter schools and more.

Each year, the National Center for Education Statistics releases a report on the state of education that includes tons of new data.

Some of the stories emerging from the report:

For-profit colleges spend less than a third of what public colleges do on teaching students, even though they charge higher tuition on average than public colleges. For-profits actually spend more on student services and administration than public colleges, but spend almost nothing on research or public service, according to the report.

 

Click to enlarge

Not surprisingly, for-profit colleges have been booming in the last decade. Since 2000, for-profits have gone from enrolling 3 percent of all undergrads in the country to 9 percent.

Charter schools have also made a rapid ascent, going from 340,000 students to more than 1.4 million in 2009. Those numbers are likely to keep climbing, with many states planning to expand the number of charters.

The news wasn’t as good for private schools, which have declined in the past decade from enrolling 6.3 million students in 2002 to 5.5 million in 2010, according to the report. Most of that drop comes from declining enrollments at and closures of Catholic parish and diocese schools, according to Education Week.

Read the full report.