IN THE UNITED STATES, suspicions about private, for-profit universities’ high cost and dubious quality abound. Elsewhere in the Americas, though, the story is far more positive.

After equally hectic expansion, Brazil’s for-profit institutions have three-quarters of the country’s higher education market — with fees kept low and quality rising fast. And since a degree boosts wages by a bigger multiple in Brazil than in any other country tracked by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, graduates can make back their tuition fees in just a few years.

Soon Brazil will become home not only to the world’s liveliest for-profit education sector, but to its biggest for-profit higher education firm, too. In May, the anti-trust regulator, CADE, approved the purchase by Kroton, the biggest education firm in Brazil, of Anhanguera, the second-biggest, to create a giant with a stock market value of around 18 billion reais (Rs.48,000 crore).

“Quality (in education) is easy,” says Rodrigo Galindo, Kroton’s energetic young boss. “And so is quantity. What’s difficult is combining the two.” The trick, he explains, is to abandon “handcrafted” teaching methods for scalable ones: online course materials and tutors; star teachers’ lessons broadcast by satellite; tightly specified franchise agreements with hundreds of local teaching centres staffed by moderators. The company has invested heavily in ‘adaptive’ learning materials — computerised courses that react to users’ progress by offering further explanation and examples where answers suggest they are struggling, and moving on swiftly where they are not.

Unopar, a university in Londrina, a foggy city in the south-eastern state of Paraná, was bought by Kroton in 2011 and is one of its best-known brands. A decade ago, it became the first institution in Brazil to get federal accreditation for the distance-training of teachers. It soon realised that other degrees could be offered with the same combination of high-quality online materials and weekly attendance at seminars at a local centre. It’s now Brazil’s biggest provider of distance higher education, with 150,000 students registered in nearly 500 centres nationwide. The most remote, with 300 students, is in Oriximina in the Amazonian state of Pará, accessible only by light plane or a 12-hour boat ride from Manaus, the region’s main city.

“These courses aren’t easy,” says Elisa Assis, Unopar’s director for distance education. “What they are is flexible.” Web-only courses often have high drop-out rates, she explains. One reason for the weekly get-togethers, during which students watch a class broadcast from headquarters followed by a moderated discussion, is to keep students engaged and on track. Their questions give the university instant feedback on how each lesson went, allowing it to improve courses.

(Excerpted and adapted from )