Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Education Dive story, Ben Unglesbee investigates the tumultuous for-profit college sector, and the dramatic effects that private equity have had on it.

• Adults whose careers are jeopardized by economic downturn often turn to for-profit colleges, and also can be the most easily taken advantage of by private equity firms who are more interested in making profit than providing an adequate, affordable education. How can the nonprofit sector ensure these people are protected and treated fairly?

• To learn about how some for-profit colleges have transitioned to nonprofits and the difficulties those institutions faced, click here.

Private equity firms typically purchase companies with debt financing and look to sell them at a profit within several years, either to public markets or other private buyers. A paper released last year examining 88 such deals across nearly 1,000 colleges zeroed in on their impact on student outcomes and operations.

The findings cast a shadow over private equity's involvement in higher ed, with buyouts tied to less spent on education, higher tuition, more debt per student, lower graduation and repayment rates, and lower earnings for graduates.

Buyouts of for-profit colleges largely follow the sector's own trajectory over the past 12 years. Deals hit a peak of 20 in 2009 following two consecutive years of 17 deals each, according to PitchBook data.

These were boom years at for-profits in terms of revenue and enrollment, as adults went back to school seeking new skills and credentials in the wake of the financial collapse. And the colleges were expanding rapidly to meet that demand — investments that would leave many with potentially catastrophic fixed costs when enrollment trends turned negative. (From 2010 to 2016, for-profit enrollment fell 47% from 1.7 million to 915,000 students after ballooning from 403,000 students in 2000, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.)

Read the full article about private equity and for-profit colleges by Ben Unglesbee at Education Dive