Another private college is becoming a for-profit. As Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik reports:
Dana College, a small Lutheran liberal arts institution in Nebraska, announced Tuesday evening that it is being sold to a new for-profit company. The sale comes just a year after another Lutheran institution, Waldorf College in Iowa, was sold to a for-profit entity.
I’ve written before about the increasingly frequent situation where gigantic education corporations buy struggling schools to, in the words of the Jaschik article, “use the college and its accreditation as a base for online operations.” But this one’s a little different though.
Dana College’s buyer is the Dana Education Corporation, a company recently formed by Nebraska higher education administrators apparently specifically in order to save Dana College.
According to the college, the goal of the sale is to increase enrollment and strengthen programs. The school does not plan to offer an online-only curriculum to any students.
The sale, the terms of which were not made public by the school, comes after a major benefactor of the school, Howard Hawks, announced in 2007 that he would stop giving money to Dana unless the college found a way to cut costs, preferably by merging with nearby Midland Lutheran College.
The merger never happened.
