When people hear the words “private higher education”, most North Americans’ imaginations immediately jump to one of two mental images: prestigious Ivy League universities, or predatory chains of private colleges like ITT Technical Institutes or Corinthian Colleges or something like that.  But private higher education globally is actually more varied than this.  Let’s take a quick tour.

Prestigious Private Non-Profits.  These are your Harvards, your Stanfords, your MITs.  Outside the United States, these are pretty rare: Japan has a few (Waseda, Keio), and there are a few others scattered around Asia, but apart from that, this is not the dominant form of private higher education around the world.

Religious Higher Education Institutes:   If you’re looking for the most generalized form of private higher education in the world, one you can find almost anywhere, universities sponsored by established religions are pretty much it.  Canadian higher education was nearly entirely founded on the basis of such organizations (though they pretty much all subsequently accepted government money and went public), and we still have several such institutions (e.g. Atlantic Theology School in Nova Scotia, Redeemer and Tyndale in Ontario, Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, etc.  Churches are also the primary sponsor of private universities in Africa.  These schools are not simply religious institutions, either.  In some countries, they have become major multi-disciplinary universities (for example, Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan), and in Chile, the religious privates – in particular the Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile – are the biggest research powerhouses in the country.

Philanthropic Enthusiast Universities:  Some private universities exist to lose money – tons and tons of money, usually belonging to rich people who have a particular angle on higher education.  Stanford more or less started out this way (though it later developed into something much larger).  Bond University in Australia is another example.  They are particularly common in the Middle East, where individual rulers set up their own private institutions outside the government-funded systems (eg. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and Al-Faisal Universities in Saudi, or Kalifah University in the UAE (that said, distinguishing these universities from public institutions in the Middle East is a bit of a mug’s game, given the way the public finances are intertwined with those of the ruling families).  Central European University, which George Soros funded to the tune of a quarter billion dollars, comes under the same heading.

Foreign Campuses.  Foreign branch campuses are more or less by definition private, even if the sponsoring foreign institution is public (e.g. University of Nottingham’s campuses in Malaysia and China).  Paradoxically, foreign private universities can become quasi-public institutions if they are bought and paid for by a domestic government (for example, Cornell and Georgetown’s campuses in Education City in Doha).  A third variety are “national” ex-pat campuses like the American Universities of Beirut or Cairo, or the German-Jordanian University, which are technically domestic institutions but still have a strong foreign flavour to them.

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Corporate Universities: I’m not talking about corporate training centres like McDonald’s Hamburger U, here – I’m talking about occasions when, corporations buy or found multi-disciplinary universities themselves.  In South Korea, Sung Kyung Kwan University, purportedly the country’s oldest higher education institution, was bought by Samsung over 20 years ago.  In Kazakhstan, a number of public universities were converted into joint-stock companies and overtly privatized in the early 2000s.  In a somewhat similar vein, in Malaysia, a number of public corporations run their own universities not as internal training units but as a way to increase the supply of skilled graduates to the country as a whole (e.g. the Oil Company Petronas runs a Technology University, Telekom Malaysia runs a Multi-Media University, etc.)

Corporate Chain Universities:  These are big, corporate, (usually) for-profit institutions which have many branches around the world.  In Canada, these institutions are nearly all restricted to delivering sub-degree credentials, but elsewhere they tend to be hand out degrees.  At the cheap/less-reputable end of this group are institutions like Corinthian or ITT Technical Institutes (both of which underwent financial collapse earlier in the decade), but also the better-known University of Phoenix.  At the more respectable end of the spectrum is the US-based Laureate Universities, which has 60 campuses in 20 countries.  But it is not just a US-based phenomenon: India has a number of similar multi-campus, private universities spread over several countries, in particular Amity University and Manipal University

Family Business Universities: Particularly in the Americas, many privates might be called “family businesses” or “mom/pop shops”, or just “some dude (usually a dude, anyway) with an office”.  Effectively, they are small/medium businesses that just happen to be in the business of education.  In Latin America, you get a lot of small private universities like this, often in the field of law.  Because they don’t necessarily make a lot of money, they are not always structured as for-profit entities (you can still take a lot of money out of a non-profit “for services rendered”) When they get very successful, they can sometimes become quite large: Puerto Rico’s Universidad del Este is one that springs to mind.  In Canada, these organizations tend to be structured to give sub-degree level programming (i.e. diplomas, certificates), and this category includes an awful lot of what we call “private vocational institutions”.  Pet-grooming schools, for instance, usually come under this heading (don’t laugh – pet groomers make good steady cash and these schools tend to have among the lowest loan default rates of any sub-category of private institutions.)

There you go, a full tour.  Just remember all this and be incredibly interesting at parties.