Indiana-based Purdue University is buying for-profit Kaplan University, which has three campuses in Maine among its 15 locations nationwide.
In a press release, Purdue, a land-grant institution founded nearly 150 years ago, says the acquisition will lead to the creation of a new public university intended to expand access to higher education.
Kaplan-Maine President Christopher Quinn says Kaplan has around 1,000 students in Maine who, along with faculty, will make the transition to the yet-to-be-named Purdue-affiliated university. And he says Kaplan staff will remain in place.
“The Kaplan portion of this will deliver all the student support services, all the technical services and all those elements that Purdue has chosen not to build on their own,” he says.
Purdue officials says that the initiative is meant to address what the university calls “two striking new realities” — the need for postsecondary education for working adults and others unsuited to traditional campus study, and the “explosive growth of online technologies as a means of delivering education.”
