For-profit educational institutions have been on the rise in recent decades in the United States. This brief reviews the literature on for-profit healthcare education programs nationally and analyzes the enrollment, tuition, and demographic characteristics of students in programs in California. Overall, limited research makes it difficult to draw wide conclusions about the impact of for-profit models on healthcare education, but there are some key examples. In nursing, for-profit status has been associated with lower first-time NCLEX pass rates—a widely accepted measure of nursing school quality. However, available literature suggests that for-profit medical schools in the US are comparable to non-profit medical schools in most important metrics. In California specifically, our data analysis finds that for-profit programs are concentrated in nursing, specifically practical nursing degrees, and are limited or nonexistent in medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, and physician assisting. For-profit dental and medical schools in California have notably higher numbers of white students and lower numbers of Latino students.
