Home News Four questions about the University of Arizona-Ashford University deal – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Four questions about the University of Arizona-Ashford University deal – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The University of Arizona announced this week that it was taking over the for-profit, 35,000-student Ashford University in a 15-year partnership that resembles Purdue University’s 2017 arrangement with Kaplan University. That Purdue-Kaplan deal is still raising questions. This one is too. Here are four questions that are top of mind for me (for now, at least).

Will taking over Ashford be a plus for Arizona on academic and reputation fronts?

A lot of this question revolves on how Ashford is viewed. Like Kaplan, Ashford has been losing money and facing falling enrollments. And perhaps even more so than Kaplan was around the time it made its deal, Ashford has been faulted for its misleading recruiting practices and poor completion rates.

The first takes haven’t exactly been raves, with Phil Hill, an IT consultant, blogging that Arizona’s move looks like a distraction that’s “solving the wrong problems,” New America’s Kevin Carey tweeting that Arizona should have called it “an exciting deal to rent the University of Arizona’s prestigious brand name,” and the director of Arizona’s own Center for the Study of Higher Education, Gary Rhoades, decrying the deal as “a cynical partnership of convenience that is all about … the $” in a tweet.

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