Key Points: AI-assisted summary
- • Purdue University bought Kaplan University for $1 in 2017, creating Purdue University Global to expand its online presence.
- • The online university has struggled with profitability, accumulating a net financial position of -$35 million despite recent gains.
- • Purdue Global spends heavily on marketing and pays significant fees to Kaplan, which operates the non-academic side of the school.
- • As a public benefit corporation, Purdue Global is exempt from Indiana's public records laws, limiting financial transparency.
WEST LAFAYETTE, IN – When Purdue bought Kaplan University, one of the largest online colleges in the country, the headlines were easy to write.
Purdue paid a nominal fee of $1 in April 2017 to acquire Kaplan’s 32,000 students, 3,000 employees and entire educational infrastructure — 178 programs and 14 campuses — in a move that immediately catapulted the school near the top of the Big Ten in online-only undergraduates.
It was a stunning, aggressive move, higher education experts reported at the time.
Kaplan was among a group of for-profit online schools that had grown rapidly in the 2010s, its profits growing even faster. By 2015, according to U.S. Department of Education data, the school was raking in $100 million a year.
But the price of that growth, critics said, was the well-being of students. A 2012 U.S. Senate report that analyzed the practices of Kaplan and 29 other large for-profits found the industry aggresively chased students at the expense of their education and post-graduation prospects. Increased regulation and bad publicity followed. By 2017, Kaplan's profits had shrunk by three quarters amid tumbling enrollment.
Copyright © 2025 www.jconline.com