Doug Lederman of Inside Higher Education on a new $100 million fund investing in higher education.

The space between nonprofit and for-profit higher education gets a little more crowded today.

University Ventures Fund, a $100 million investment partnership founded by a quartet of veterans of the for-profit and nonprofit education sectors, is the latest entrant in a market that aims to use private capital to expand the reach and impact of traditional colleges and universities.

The fund, whose two biggest investors are the media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG and the University of Texas Investment Management Company, is focused on stimulating “innovation from within the academy,” rather than competing with it from the outside, David Figuli, a lawyer and partner in University Ventures, said in an interview Monday. The projects will include helping institutions expand the scale of their academic programs, re-engineer how they deliver instruction, and better measure student outcomes; the first two investments, also announced today, will be creating a curriculum through Brandman University aimed at improving the educational outcomes of Hispanic students, and a company that helps universities in Britain and elsewhere in Europe deliver their courses online.

The entire piece has some great details on the types of investments this new firm, University Ventures Fund. Its clear that they believe there is a lot of innovation on campus (I tend to agree based on my research and the history of higher education in the U.S).

via New investment fund to help traditional colleges take ideas to scale | Inside Higher Ed.