Time & Perspective Quote by John Larson

“Targets” is the tell. Larson’s sentence dresses itself in the calm, procedural language of due diligence, but it smuggles in a worldview where colleges are not civic institutions so much as assets to be acquired, optimized, and folded into a corporate portfolio. The phrase “tremendous strategic fit” signals that the end goal isn’t education broadly defined; it’s alignment with an existing business model. Even “complementary education programs” reads less like curricular synergy than market coverage: which student demographics, credential types, or delivery modes will plug holes in the company’s offerings?

The list of criteria is rhetorically clever because it front-loads reassurance. “Excellent reputation” and “long operating history” are credibility proxies, meant to calm legislators, accrediting bodies, and wary communities who’ve watched higher ed get strip-mined by bad actors. Yet reputation here also functions as a brand to be purchased, a shortcut past the trust deficit that new entrants face.

“Solid regulatory compliance” is the most politically charged clause. It acknowledges, without admitting, that the regulatory environment around education is both punitive and porous. By emphasizing compliance, Larson is speaking to risk management: the threat of investigations, loss of federal aid eligibility, or state scrutiny. Subtext: we’re not the reckless kind of consolidators; we’re the safe kind.

Context matters: this is the idiom of late-stage institutional consolidation, where public goods are increasingly narrated through the metrics of mergers and acquisitions. Larson isn’t merely describing selection criteria; he’s legitimizing a transaction by translating education into governance-friendly corporate language.