SVA's "for-profit" status

unsoccer-mom
Tue, 02 Aug 2005 15:30:15 +0000

Taxguy wrote in a recent thread on SCAD regarding the school’s status as a for-profit (proprietary) school “Response: SCAD is different from all these in that SCAD is, or at least was when I last looked, a “for profit” school. While all of the above are “non profits.” Non profit status is usually preferred because they pay no taxes and get much lower rates on postage. The only reason for a school to remain “for profit” is to enrich the owners as much as possible, which is more limited with non profits. I always suspect any school that is “for profit” even SVA even if SVA has a fine reputation.”

My daughter is an admitted freshman at SVA and I look forward to discovering more about the school which I will share in this forum. As a result of the above comment regarding SVA’s “for profit” status I decided to dig a bit deeper. On a previous post I wrote that from a review of SVA’s annual report it appeared that most of the profits were being returned to the school. The following is a quote from testimony given before the U.S House of Representatives by SVA’s President David Rhodes; “A rigorous arts education is sufficiently costly that SVA, although a closely held for-profit institution, has never paid dividends to its stockholders. All of SVA’s surpluses are reinvested in the education of its students.”

Here is the link to the full testimony.
http://edworkforce.house.gov/hearings/109th/fc/60minutes030105/rhodes.htm

Taxguy, you have made several remarks about SVA’s for-profit status and while I certainly appreciate the information; it seems to be a bit of misinformation as it paints SVA with the same broad brush as other proprietary schools while not providing information specific to SVA.

I am not trying to pick a fight, but I do think it is important to be specific and to be able to support statements with documented information. If there is more specific negative information regarding SVA’s for-profit status, I would be very interested in hearing about it.