Dive Brief:

• The future for for-profit educators in the U.S. may lie in educational bootcamps, nanodegrees, and short online courses, Reuters reports.
• While the large for-profit college companies like Apollo Education Group and ITT Educational Services Inc. are facing dwindling enrollments, smaller schools with niche courses are gaining popularity.
• For students, one primary benefit of short courses that teach specific skills wanted by employers is the absence of the large student loan debts associated with for-profit degree programs.​

Dive Insight:

For the for-profit colleges, offering short courses and online courses is a way to diversify their revenue streams, especially as they face stricter regulations from the U.S. Department of Education. The for-profits can also take steps to partner more with potential employers to develop courses that will bring better job placement results for their students, which will help them meet the Department of Education's gainful employment rules coming this year. But bootcamps can still be expensive, considering how short they are —​ Mobile Makers Academy offers a computer coding bootcamp for eight weeks that costs $9,000.