A few weeks ago I referenced an analysis put together by InterEd at the end of this post. The link to the presentation is at the end of the post and is worth a second look. It helps argue the fact that the for-profit education industry will play a significant role in educating millions, and at a significant discount when compared to state run schools.

Today, Apollo released a paper that takes a similar approach in defending the for-profit EDU space. The paper titled “Higher Education at a Crossroads” argues that the education goals set by the current Administration are unattainable without for-profit schools.

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The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) sent out undercover applicants to 15 different schools across the country. These applicants uncovered numerous deceptive and fraudulent tactics used by the schools they applied with. The statistically irrelevant information sent stocks declining and lawyers spinning. No longer then two days after the document was leaked two separate Law Offices sent out press releases (here and here) stating that they will begin an Investigation on behalf of EDMC shareholders to find out if there were any possible breaches of fiduciary duty or other violations of the law.

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Mara Fineshriber is director of marketing for Western Governors University, and she’s seeing a surge of interest in online education these days.  That means her school receives a lot of online leads.  Western Governors University is a non-profit, online-only school located in Utah.  Governors from 19 states founded the institution to help people earn their degrees “independent of time or place.”

Fineshriber’s marketing efforts have made her colleague Edward Rios, the university’s director of enrollment, very busy.  The job of Rios’ team is to review thousands of online leads and work with applicants to help them qualify to attend WGU and earn a bachelor’s or master’s degree.  From a business standpoint, each online lead that becomes a qualified applicant and, eventually, an enrolled student spells thousands of dollars in tuition for the school.

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This is an interesting week for news and rumors in the education lead generation space.

First, earlier this month TechFlash announced that the rumors were confirmed that All Star Directories is currently on the market. The company who runs a number of organically ranked EDU portals and who is one of the leaders in the space for generating quality leads maybe timing the sale just perfectly. When EDU is at its all time high and investments are pouring into the vertical it will be interesting to see what the company garners from the sale. Any thoughts on the timing and possible reasons for the sale?

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Are they really “branded leads”? Better yet; Are “branded leads” really exclusive?

The EDU space is different then any other vertical slightly different then other verticals in how leads are captured. I am tempted to cross out the whole sentence and say that it is no different then any other vertical, but I will give the vertical a little credit and say it has a few differences. The key difference is the attention that lead buyers give to “branded leads”. Even though directories have been around in other verticals of ages, like the mortgage vertical, the attention to buying branded leads has never been so strong.

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It is no secret that the for-profit education vertical is seeing some very nice growth on both the supply and demand side of the lead gen table. A few weeks ago the guys at Sparkroom commented on the excellent growth that DeVry currently realizing and this week the Apollo Group is expected to release their earnings reports as well. If they meet the streets expectations they will post 25.9% YOY growth in enrollments, which would be almost 6% more then DeVry posted just weeks ago.

The growth stems from a number of factors, but there are two that clearly stand out from the rest. The first being the increased access to the Internet. The more people have access to the Internet inside their homes the more likely they are going to use it for continuing education. There is an obvious convenience factor at play. Couple that with the increase in corporate layoffs, increased unemployment rate and fewer jobs, more and more people are going back to school. The for-profit edu space is benefiting from being a counter cyclical to a declining economy. Cleary two very obvious factors.

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Tree.com continues its goal of interstellar domination with yet another acquisition. These very calculated acquisitions, while on the surface are not the biggest moves you will see by a company the size of Tree.com, but should be considered Chess moves. These acquisitions are pieces to the big puzzle that Doug Lebda touched on at last years Targus Lead Quality Summit, (which is a must attend) about providing a single source for all life’s biggest decisions. And in these times continuing education is an important decision people are making everyday.

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