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US schools, desperate for cash, are selling out to Chinese buyers
For many schools, the choice is dire: sell or shut down.
Cash-strapped schools are increasingly turning to Chinese buyers to help keep their doors open.
In Princeton, New Jersey, Westminster Choir College has lost $10.7 million since 2015 and its affiliated university, Rider University, was been downgraded by Moody’s to a negative outlook in November, which laid the ground work for the school’s sale to Chinese company, Beijing Kaiwen Education Technology, for $40 million this February, reports Bloomberg.
Though faculty and students worry about what their new buyers will do in the long-term to the prestigious institution, more and more financially precarious schools are making a similar choice.
“Absolutely you will see more of these,” Kent John Chabotar, of education consultant MPK&D, to Bloomberg. “It’s the only way some of these places will survive.”
The Westminster deal is the fourth deal of its kind — with an U.S. institution and a Chinese company — since 2015. [Bloomberg] — Erin Hudson