non-profit vs social enterprise vs for-profit

By the time you reach graduate school, it's expected that you know what you want to do with your life, and you know what career path you want to follow. When I was preparing to apply for grad schools, I I thought I wanted to get involved in some sort of non-profit management. While researching the program at Heinz College, I stumbled upon something “new” called a “social enterprise.” While it turns out there's some debate about what exactly constitutes a social enterprise, it was clear that it was some sort of middle ground between a typical non-profit organization and typical for-profit business. I knew immediately that non-profit management was not what I'd be getting into, because in my mind, a social enterprise had all the benefits of a non-profit with even more advantages.

The more reading I did, the more comparisons I found between social enterprises and other for-profit companies. One good example is an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Every Business Is (Or Should Be) a Social Business (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/every_business_is_or_should_be.html). The article claims exactly what you would expect from the name. It states that business models are essentially the same for social and non-social businesses, and even lists some examples of current social businesses running under a typical business model. What struck me most, however, was not the claims this article made.

For some reason, this article in particular made me question why there aren't more non-profits trying to be social enterprises. They surely exist, and maybe there's an answer out there and I just don't know enough about non-profits. But the burning question remains in my mind- Why isn't EVERY non-profit trying to make its own profit and stop relying on money that has to be spent in a very specific way?