Category Archives: Corporate University

Plain Dealer: Mystery buyer ready to take over ailing Myers U.

An out-of-state firm is preparing to purchase struggling Myers University.

The buyer is a for-profit entity known in legal documents only as Myers Education LLC. It’s a legitimate group that on Tuesday signed a letter of intent to buy the 160-year-old institution, said Mary Whitmer, an attorney representing the court-appointed special master overseeing the university’s interests.

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The Chronicle: Sale of Antioch College to Alumni Group Breaks Down, and Board Seeks New Offers

A deal to sell Antioch College to an independent corporation made up of alumni and former trustees fell apart late last week, leaving the future of the Yellow Springs, Ohio, institution once again in jeopardy.

On Wednesday night, the Board of Trustees of Antioch University, the college’s parent institution, voted unanimously to reject an offer of $12.2-million from the Antioch College Continuation Corporation. That group, which is known as ACC or AC3, asked for time to reconfigure its offer. “But on Friday we were notified by the AC3 that the deal was off,” Lynda Sirk, a spokeswoman for the university, said on Sunday. “The board really thought that we were on the brink of a deal.”

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Las Vegas Sun: UNLV wants to open campus in Middle East
Region’s tourism hot spot a good fit, dean says

Tucked between Saudi Arabia and Oman, with beaches kissed by the Persian Gulf, the United Arab Emirates might seem alien to Nevadans. But the oil-rich Middle Eastern federation with a population of more than 4 million has close ties to Las Vegas.

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The Chronicle: Capella University Overcharged Student Lenders $588,000, Audit Finds

Washington — Capella University, an online, for-profit institution based in Minneapolis, could be asked by the U.S. Education Department to repay more than a half-million dollars in student-aid money.

The department’s inspector general has issued an audit in which it contends that the university overcharged lenders participating in the federal guaranteed-student-loan program, and the department itself, by a total of $588,000.

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Inside Higher Ed: Private Colleges Proliferating, Worldwide

With the demand for higher education ever-growing and unmet internationally, the private sector continues to grow. A paper to be presented this week at the Comparative and International Education Society conference in New York explores global patterns in the growth of private higher education – how it increases access and who for, how private institutions expand, and what the worries are.

“Fewer and fewer countries disallow private higher education, whereas many did several decades back,” writes Daniel C. Levy, a professor and director of the Program for Research on Private Higher Education at the State University of New York at Albany. “Furthermore, while private growth has often exploded unexpectedly and on the fringes of legislation, it has also emerged where laws have been liberalized” – in various Indian states and Chinese provinces, for instance. Whereas private education earlier developed in Latin America outside of a “state directive,” it’s increasingly common, Levy writes, for governments in Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East “to articulate a rationale for private access.” In the context of the report and international higher education, “private” can mean nonprofit, for-profit or somewhere in between.

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The Chronicle News Blog: U. of Texas at Austin to Form Partnership With Saudi University

The University of Texas at Austin is the latest American institution to sign an agreement to help King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, the ambitious $10-billion research institution that Saudi Arabia plans to open in 2009, design an academic curriculum and hire faculty members.

The two universities announced today a research-and-educational partnership in computational earth science and engineering.

The Texas agreement followed the Saudi institution’s similar deals, made public on Tuesday, with Stanford University and with the University of California at Berkeley. Under the arrangements, each American university will receive $10-million to conduct joint research projects with Kaust, as the Saudi institution is known, as well as another $10-million to pursue projects of its own choosing.

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The Chronicle: Berkeley and Stanford Sign Deals With New Saudi University, Despite Some Professors’ Misgivings

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, the ambitious $10-billion research institution that Saudi Arabia plans to open in 2009, announced on Tuesday that it had signed agreements with Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley to help it design an academic curriculum and hire faculty members.

Inside Higher Ed: From Bay Area to Red Sea

Two prominent California universities announced lucrative five-year contracts Tuesday to recruit faculty for and undertake collaborative research with an as-yet unopened Saudi Arabian university.

The University of California at Berkeley is set to receive $28 million and Stanford University $25 million under the five-year agreements with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a graduate research university on the Red Sea expected to open in fall 2009 with a multi-billion dollar endowment.

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The Tennessean: Career college closes suddenly

Decision made months ago, but students kept in dark

Samara Gidcomb, 27, a single mother in Ashland City, was taking classes to earn her paralegal diploma.

She and other students arrived at Tennessee Career College in Donelson on Monday, the first day after a monthlong break, to find out the school was closed.

“It was a very, very devastating day for all of us,” Gidcomb said.

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The Chronicle: Audio Interview: Educating for Profits

Robert S. Silberman, chief executive of Strayer Education Inc., and Sondra Stallard, president of Strayer University, discuss how their for-profit institution works to grow and be profitable without compromising on quality

http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i25/strayer/?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

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International Herald Tribune: New Mexico AD says partnership with casino hotel is all business

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.: At first glance, a record $2.5 million sponsorship agreement between New Mexico’s athletic department and a tribal casino hotel might seem at odds with NCAA rules against gambling.

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Inside Higher Ed: Tears for a For-Profit College’s Demise

Think of all the ink (or its digital equivalent) that has been spilled in national publications (including this one) over the possible closure of places like Antioch College and the New College of California. Distraught faculty and staff bemoaning lost opportunities for students. Anguished alumni and local residents decrying the potential disappearance of a cherished community asset. And dozens, even hundreds, of faculty and staff members confronted with the loss of their jobs.

Contrast that with the relative silence (here and elsewhere) that greeted last week’s announcement that Career Education Corp. planned to “teach out,” or slowly close, nine of 11 unprofitable campuses that it had announced in November 2006 that it would try to sell. (The company had previously announced that it would shutter two other troubled campuses.) But as one of our bloggers noted critically, Friday’s announcement and most of the coverage of it focused on the decision as a bottom-line call by a for-profit company, after Career Education said it had been unable to find a suitable buyer for the institutions.

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The Chronicle News Blog: Apollo Group Buys University in Chile

The University of Phoenix is getting a Chilean cousin. Apollo Group Inc., the parent company of Phoenix, announced today that it was buying a 3,000-student university in Santiago, Chile’s capital, for as much as $49-million.

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The Chronicle News Blog: American InterContinental U. to Close Its Troubled Los Angeles Campus

American InterContinental University, an arm of the Career Education Corporation, has announced plans to gradually close down its troubled Los Angeles campus.

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Courier-Journal: Law School Is Sold and Owners Leave in Settlement With Students Who Sued

Students at Kentucky’s first for-profit law school have forced its owners to cease their role in the school’s operation and relinquish ownership.

In a settlement struck late yesterday in a lawsuit filed by more than 30 students at the American Justice School of Law in Paducah, the three owners of the school, including two deans, agreed to transfer ownership to an investors group headed by a local physician and to play no role in its future administration, said the students’ lawyer, Dennis Null.

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Inside Higher Ed: The Washington Post Company continues to diversify not in journalism but in for-profit education. Last year, the company reported that it took in more revenue from its Kaplan businesses than the newspaper business. In filings last week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Post reported that it had purchased an 8.1 percent stake in Corinthian Colleges Inc.

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Inside Higher Ed: Career Education Inc. on Friday announced plans to shut nine colleges, seven of them part of the Katherine Gibbs chain, following a “teach out” period to help current students. A statement from Career Education said that the move was part of a previously announced strategy to focus on key areas, and that attempts to sell the colleges didn’t succeed. Supporters of New Hampshire’s McIntosh College, one of the institutions being shut down, are angry and frustrated, Seacoast Online reported.

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The New York Times: Marymount Being Sold; Village to Gain Taxes

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY has agreed to sell the historic Marymount College campus in Tarrytown for $27 million to EF Education, a private language school with 10 campuses in the country and 35 throughout the world.

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