This country's ten thousand proprietary, or profitmaking, vocational schools are big business. They enroll over 3 million students each year, producing gross annual revenues of at least 2.5 billion dollars on which substantial corporate, property, and personal income taxes are paid. Cosmetology schools represent a third of the total number; trade and technical schools another third. Although correspondence schools represent less than a tenth of the proprietaries, they enroll two-thirds of the students and produce over half of the industry's income. Despite their unavoidable presence, proprietaries weren't discovered by educational policymakers until a few years ago. One plausible explanation is that in the early days proprietary schools were conducted as businesses, but academic and business interests have merged in the past decade. This merging of interests may change into outright competition as all schools scramble for their share of the student market and federal dollars. This report will identify some major findings about residential proprietary students (excluding correspondence schools) against which findings from a fresh study underway at the University of California's Center for Research and Development in Higher Education have been juxtaposed. (Author/GP)