The big news yesterday was Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post for $250 million.
While the sale did not include WaPo publications Slate, The Root, and Foreign Policy it did, interestingly enough, include Kaplan, Inc., the test preparation company and controversial for-profit college.
In the second quarter of this year the Washington Post Company’s reported $1 billion in revenue. Some $548 million of that came from Kaplan, Inc., according to Inside Higher Ed.
While Washington Post Company CEO Donald Graham has often seemed to twist himself into knots to defend for-profit colleges (and keep the federal financial aid money flowing into them) the Bezos take on proprietary education is a big mystery.
Matt Yglesias noted yesterday on Twitter that while a lot of the Washington Post Company’s revenue comes from Kaplan, Inc. the company’s profit mostly comes from cable and TV stations.
Update:
This was just straight up wrong. He doesn’t own Kaplan. So he will do nothing with Kaplan. #fail
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