When for-profit college business models were launched years ago, popularized with its on-line offered services, it got cheered by many enthusiasts including the Wall Street. In this opportunity, AAEA will analyze how the adjusted daily stock prices have evolved overtime of the parent companies who run these randomly selected for-profit institutions, without any special interests on AAEA side–this is just another research we are continuing on doing and presenting to the American public. The stock of these three companies’ are publicly traded at the New York Stock Exchange under the code COCO, EDMC and APOL, respectively for Corinthian Colleges, EDMC (Education Management Corporation) and Apollo Group. Corinthian Colleges parent company runs several different higher education institutions such as Everest College. Institute of Arts campuses are under EDMC’s management, while the University of Phoenix is managed by Apollo Group. Recent dynamic that is happening surrounding for-profit education institutions trigger these analyses. The question that one might have: Do for-profit college business models become obsolete? Will the same chaos ever happen on not-for-profit private schools that can not survive the CAR?
Applying a simple education analytics, IRI Intelligence and big data approaches, the Association pulled series of adjusted closing of the respective institution’s stock prices from Yahoo Finance® as shown below. The sole purpose of these analyses is just to give a simple and general idea on what could happen in the industry to the general public. The Association never claimed that the results be used in any short or long-term or any other forms of financial investment decisions. In contrary, through this simple approach, we would like to show the potential power of big data approaches and education analytics applications in the decision making process. Because the nature of such a short study, rigorous statistical analyses (both econometrics and time-series i.e., unit-root tests are not conducted). Therefore, readers need to be aware of potential flaws and limitations, such as a lower R-square. The Association and its researchers never suggested that readers have to take any particular position in any forms in the market nor did we suggest anything beyond what we have stated about the purpose of this particular research project.
