The University of Phoenix is owned by Apollo Education Group which trades publicly under the symbol of APOL. The company reported dismal earnings and is now laying off 900 employees. The company has watched half of their enrollment drop in 5 years.
Online Education, Classes and Degree have always been high paying keywords, back in 2011 WordStream released the 20 highest paying keywords for Google AdWords. They recently did a list for Bing where education did not make the top 20.
From 2011 Google AdWords:
Top 10 Most Expensive Google Keywords
The Top 10 Most Expensive Keywords are:
- Insurance
- Loans
- Mortgage
- Attorney
- Credit
- Lawyer
- Donate
- Degree
- Hosting
- Claim
You’ll notice that these top ten most expensive AdWords keywords deal primarily with financing and industries that manage vast sums of money. The fact that the educational keyword “degree” is one of the top ten most expensive Google keywords, right up with lawyers and credit, reminds us of the growing cost of education.
The next ten most expensive keywords complete our total list, resulting the top 20 most expensive AdWords keywords:
- Conference Call
- Trading
- Software
- Recovery
- Transfer
- Gas/Electricity
- Classes
- Rehab
- Treatment
- Cord Blood
Degree and Classes are not as high now on a CPC basis, however Online Classes is still expensive according to the Google Keyword Planner. So if your payouts are down when it comes to parking or maybe you have a mini site, there may be some correlation to what is going on with University of Phoenix.
CNN Money wrote about the recent downturn in earnings:
The for-profit institution has shed about half of its students over the past five years, and the university has fired 900 employees since September. That works out to over 3 workers laid off every day.
University of Phoenix’s parent company, Apollo Education Group (APOL), announced dismal quarterly earnings Monday after the markets closed. Its revenue and student enrollment both dropped about 14% from the same time a year ago.
The University of Phoenix and others have long been criticized for the quality and cost of their education. Studies have shown that graduates of for-profit colleges are more likely to default on their student loans than graduates of non-profit colleges.
University of Phoenix has closed over 100 campuses in recent years. Meanwhile, its former competitor, Corinthian College, shut down last year.
Read the full article on CNN Money
While going to school overseas in Japan, I selected a degree plan for Business Administration from UMUC over Phoenix. Luckily, I did.
One reason why there were so many campus closures was that Phoenix lost their contract to teach on military bases in Europe. Asia-Pacific went under renegotiation shortly thereafter, and subsequently lost as well; no surprise. Both of their undergraduate and graduate programs have to be off bases here by the end of August.
The loss of students can be attributed to their high number of military enrollees, which no longer are able to attend with tuition assistance from the government.
UMUC was awarded the MBA program, and will hopefully take over soon. I didn’t want to have to pursue, what is in my opinion, an MBA-lite from Phoenix. Even though all colleges that teach on base are trying to suck TA dry, the value of the programs Phoenix offered, as well as the instruction, was abysmal at best.
No one should be buying education related names. Not only will Phoenix see a continued decline, even more so as the result of govt programs for free community college gain traction, but Quinstreet should see some very negative effects from this as well. Additionally, there’s continued speculation that this industry is going to become very very regulated. Personally I own Online-Degree.com, as well as PCAT.com (pharmacy school test, like LSAT, MCAT etc) so I of all people wish this weren’t the case. But it is, so don’t buy into education domains, there’s not going to be many end users looking for them, and advertising rates on a PPC basis will continue to decline. If anyone disagrees and is bullish on education domains, hit me up, PCAT gets lots of type-in traffic.