DIGITAL GCU Today AUG issue

1 0 • GCU MAGAZ I NE Chairman of the Board for Grand Canyon Education, Inc. (GCE), listed the reasons for the transaction, through which GCE sold GCU for approximately $875 million to a nonprofit entity that will retain the GCU name: • It puts GCU on a level playing field with other traditional universities with regard to tax status. • It ensures that GCU students and faculty have the same access to research opportunities and grants as other universities. • It opens up the world of philanthropic giving to GCU. • It allows GCU to be a voting member of the NCAA. • Most importantly, it better enables GCU to continue to freeze tuition, which it has maintained for 10 straight years on the ground campus. Afterward, Mueller lauded the work of Dan Bachus, Chief Financial Officer, and Brian Roberts, Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel, and their teams for pulling together a complicated challenge. “This has not been done very many times before and never done exactly like this,” Mueller said. He added, “We feel good about how we did this, and the for-profit model and public investment, we think, should be rethought. There should be a way to make educational opportunities even greater in this country than they are today and not be so heavily reliant on tax dollars.” Approximately 35 percent, or 1,400, of full-time employees under the previous GCE flag transferred their employment to GCU along with almost all of GCE’s 6,000 part-time and adjunct employees and student workers. That leaves approximately 2,600 full-time employees working for GCE, which continues to be publicly traded and will be able to outsource its educational services, advanced technologies and expertise to other universities and even Christian high schools. One thing that will not change: the GCU campus culture. “Our student body, in and of itself, the core of who we are, is not changing,” Carpenter promised the audience. Another kind of transition Carpenter was one of only seven students in his graduating class at Trinity Lutheran School in Bend, Ore. He was incredibly successful there – student body president, National Honor Society president and captain of the basketball team – but he did not know a soul when he arrived at GCU. “We operated very much like a not-for-profit institution for 10 years. . . . Number one, we didn’t raise tuition when we could have done it very easily. . . . Secondly, almost every single dollar of profit made got reinvested into educational infrastructure.” —BRIANMUELLER , GCU PRESIDENT VIDEOON NEWS.GCU.EDU The press conference to announce GCU’s transition back to nonprofit status