Regulating Education for Profit
Tony Miller helped trash for-profit colleges. Now he hopes to cash in.
The University of Phoenix Chicago campus on July 30, 2015 in Schaumburg, Illinois. PHOTO: SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES
President Obama’s Department of Education has been waging a seven-year war against for-profit colleges. So it’s a lesson in the self-interested ways of the modern regulatory state to see a veteran of that war now seeking to profit from education.
Check out last week’s proposed sale of Apollo Education, parent company of the University of Phoenix. When Mr. Obama was preparing to take office in January 2009, Apollo stock hit a multiyear high above $78 per share. Seven years later, after Washington’s regulatory onslaught that favored nonprofits over for-profits in doling out federal subsidies, the shares had recently fallen below $7.
The University of Phoenix was once educating close to half a million students but last month reported an enrollment below 180,000. And with Apollo recently trading below book value, it might be a real bargain—especially for an investor betting that the next Administration might go easier on for-profit colleges. Now comes news that Apollo will be sold to several private equity firms. And coincidence of all coincidences, after the sale closes the company will be run by a former top official in the Obama education department, the same outfit that led the attack on Apollo.
The Vistria Group is a Chicago private-equity firm. The company was founded around the time that Mr. Obama was beginning his second term and its founders include Marty Nesbitt, who began playing pick-up basketball with Mr. Obama years before he became President, and Tony Miller, who was the second highest-ranking official in the Department of Education from 2009 until 2013.
Once the sale closes, Mr. Miller will become chairman of Apollo’s board. Mr. Miller said in Regulating Education for Profit - WSJ:
