"For-profit colleges a terrible deal"

[Ted King]

$tevie wrote:
Sadly, I think for-profit colleges are going to affect the non-profit colleges because for-profits can "buy" students right out from under a non-profit. It's all about the numbers.

There's some information in the article on a graph (gasp) that I think sheds an interesting light on this side discussion started from a non sequitur:




It differentiates between private colleges and non-profit colleges. In the text of the PDF this graph came from it explains that the term "private colleges" refers to non-profit private colleges. This is also from the PDF:

For-profit schools enroll far more high- dollar borrowers. Fifty-seven percent of Bachelor’s students who graduate from a for-profit college owe $30,000 or more. In contrast, 25 percent of those who earned degrees in the private, non-profit sector and 12 percent from the public sector borrowed at this level.

This is all pretty strong evidence that paying profits is costing students more than they would have to pay to go to a non-profit school and thus these things are evidence that the conclusion in the subject line of the OP is correct. There are also claims in the PDF that for-profit colleges also have lower graduation rates which, if true, makes them an even worse deal.