The University of Phoenixification of Elite Education

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/power/2023-12-22-university-of-phoenixification-elite-education/

CEO of Apollo Global Management Marc Rowan takes part in a panel at the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit, November 7, 2023, in Hong Kong.

Most viewers probably thought it was an inspired bit of absurdity when, during the opening sketch of a recent Saturday Night Live satirizing the now-infamous college presidents hearing on antisemitism, Kenan Thompson swooped in to offer his perspective on the matter from his post as “president of the University of Phoenix.” (“Lady, we’ll offer a class on anything … the only two mandatory classes at the University of Phoenix are ‘How to log into the University of Phoenix online’ and ‘How to set up autopay.’”) But a leading orchestrator of the entire media frenzy around antisemitism in the Ivy League, Apollo Global Management co-founder Marc Rowan, is literally the CEO of the parent company of the University of Phoenix. Apollo acquired the scandal-plagued diploma mill’s parent company, confusingly also named Apollo, in 2017. And while Rowan has been mounting what the American Association of University Professors has termed a “hostile takeover” of his alma mater in Philadelphia, he’s been simultaneously orchestrating an equally alarming plot to dump University of Phoenix onto the University of Idaho, in a scheme that could have an even more devastating impact on American higher education.

Under Apollo’s stewardship, the University of Phoenix shut down 80 associate degree programs and closed, sold, or made plans to shutter all but one of its more than 200 physical campuses and mini-campuses worldwide. It whittled its full-time faculty to just 127 full-time instructors for 96,000 students. It agreed to pay Donald Trump’s Federal Trade Commission $191 million to settle a deceptive practices lawsuit, and was the subject of more than 3,000 consumer complaints to the FTC between 2017 and the beginning of 2021, along with over 73,000 borrower defense to repayment claims to the Department of Education. It appointed its third president in a single year after the DOE launched an investigation into the role of its newly appointed president in the collapse of his last online university. And it reported a six-year graduation rate of 26.2 percent.

But for Rowan, the University of Phoenix overhaul was a glorious success. The Apollo fund that acquired the online school extracted about $1 billion in dividends during the first four years of its investment, despite the unprecedented tens of billions of dollars in student loans the Biden administration has canceled on behalf of students of virtually every shady for-profit online college other than University of Phoenix. Apollo then brokered the aforementioned lucrative agreement to double its initial investment by selling the school to the University of Idaho, though state attorney general Raúl Labrador has sued to block that purchase, arguing the deal was hashed out in secret meetings that violated state law. (The university has demanded $2,400 from a local education website to comply with open records requests it filed to learn more about the transaction.)

The media depiction of the “Ivy League antisemitism crisis” as an in-crowd battle between Harvard and its obnoxious billionaire alumnus Bill Ackman is fun, because it pits the nation’s most insufferable institution against a self-aggrandizing Wall Street jerk with a million Twitter followers, and because both sides have emerged looking worse for wear. The fraud has showcased the self-enrichment Ackman and other well-heeled Ivy League alumni derive from their tax-deductible donations, the scandal has shone a spotlight on the possible shoddiness of Harvard president Claudine Gay’s scholarship, and The New York Times has looked deservedly ridiculous for devoting ten reporters to covering the university’s palace intrigue during the deadliest war in recent memory.

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[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. There are parasites every where you look, now.