Kaplan University

Industry

Higher Education

Size

$2.5 Billion

Expertise

Business Development and Strategy development and deployment

Assignment

Kaplan University is predominantly a distance learning institution of higher education and serves more than 66,000 online and on-campus students. Kaplan offers associates, bachelors, and master degrees as well as certificates in several fields.
A principal of MainStream was engaged to lead 18 locations, three regional accreditors and four distinct business models at Kaplan High Education; this represented $180M in revenue. As a part of the assignment, we were charged with developing and executing unique strategies to improve the performance and integration of campuses into a broader organization while leveraging local strengths and ensuring accreditor acceptance.

Actions

• Rebuilt regional and local leadership teams to be able to meet or exceed both the goals of the corporation and the Trustees, while reshaping the future of their institutions during turbulent economic and regulatory times.

• Transformed one regionally accredited college from traditional New England day school with sports teams, dorms, separate day/night tuitions to a low cost education focused institution with a truly innovative cloudbased learning environment that supports new hybrid and online programs.

• Expanded new school model into four new geographies. Responsible for all aspects including strategic planning, site selection, curriculum design, school operations, technology, HR and regulatory processes.

Results

In addition to the actions noted above, our expert made a significant discovery and the analysis led to a strategic decision to migrate 12 campuses and $120M in revenue to a different division. The migration of the campuses was successfully executed in less than 90 days.