ABSTRACT
The crisis in higher education is increasingly addressed by way of something called the corporate university. The notion of a corporate university combines two major lines of thought about the contemporary crisis in higher education — commercialization and managerialism. A less literal but equally descriptive meaning of the term corporate university indicates the vast web of relationships between nonprofit institutions and commercial enterprise. In Ana Marie Cox's essay on for-profit education, she suggests that the for-profit institutions have a profound influence on the management of nonprofit higher education, that there is a "creeping for-profit ethos" spreading from the University of Phoenix "to the world." The for-profit sector in K-12 has a different business model entirely. Patterned after the privatization structure of US health care, K-12 education corporations style themselves after education management organizations and seek contracts to manage the public schools in such a way as to yield a profit.
