Strayer Education Inc., the for-profit parent of Strayer U., is merging with the Capella Education Company, another for-profit. The deal is just the latest development in what has become an increasingly volatile sector.Brooks Kraft, Getty Images
The landscape of publicly traded for-profit education looks a lot different than it did four years ago.
On Monday, Strayer Education Inc. and the Capella Education Company announced that they would merge, with Strayer becoming the corporate umbrella both universities will operate under. Each entity will retain its own governing board, president, and other administrative officers, as well as faculty and staff.
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Strayer Education Inc., the for-profit parent of Strayer U., is merging with the Capella Education Company, another for-profit. The deal is just the latest development in what has become an increasingly volatile sector.Brooks Kraft, Getty Images
The landscape of publicly traded for-profit education looks a lot different than it did four years ago.
On Monday, Strayer Education Inc. and the Capella Education Company announced that they would merge, with Strayer becoming the corporate umbrella both universities will operate under. Each entity will retain its own governing board, president, and other administrative officers, as well as faculty and staff.
“This combination will allow us to accelerate investment in the educational experience we deliver to students at both universities,” said Karl McDonnell, chief executive of Strayer, “while achieving back-office efficiencies captured through the merger of our corporate functions.”
The move is the latest in a string of changes that have fundamentally altered the terrain of for-profit higher education over the last several years.
In April, Purdue University announced that it had acquired the for-profit online-education behemoth Kaplan University. The purchase surprised many faculty members and students at the public university in Indiana.
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The Apollo Education Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, was sold to a consortium of investors in 2016, making it a privately held company.
In 2015, Corinthian Colleges Inc. announced it would cease operations at its remaining locations, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And the Career Education Corporation, which enrolled more than 100,000 students in 2011, is now a shell of its former self and has sold several of its entities.
But the sequence of misfortune for the sector does not mean that it should be counted out. Several observers have noticed a friendlier climate for for-profit colleges under the Trump administration. In June, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that the department would re-regulate the borrower defense-to-repayment and gainful-employment regulations, two Obama-era rules aimed primarily at policing the sector.
Adam Harris, a staff writer at The Atlantic, was previously a reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education and covered federal education policy and historically Black colleges and universities. He also worked at ProPublica.
