Participants at an upcoming invitation-only conference in the Washington DC area, entitled “Innovation and Public Private Partnership in Higher Education” (P3•EDU for short), will include Purdue University president Mitch Daniels and Graham Holdings chairman Donald Graham — fresh off the finalization of their troubling deal merging public Purdue and Graham’s for-profit Kaplan University.
Also scheduled to attend are two former U.S. deputy secretaries of education now profiting heavily off their past experience: Tony Miller (Obama), who is chairman of the board and a key investor in the parent company of the University of Phoenix, and William Hansen (George W. Bush), now CEO of the non-profit Strada Education Network, previously a student loan agency and now an operation whose activities seem largely aimed at enriching the group’s top executives and investing in for-profit education.