Idaho unplugs $685M pursuit of University of Phoenix

The $685 million gambit to merge the University of Idaho and a weakened, mostly online University of Phoenix has ended some two years after officials in Moscow unveiled a series of secret talks seeking to complete the transaction that never got Gem State elected leaders’ total support.

The parties have “jointly agreed to end discussion” of the purchase through a nonprofit that UI created to handle the purchase, according to a news release issued Tuesday by the University of Phoenix.

UI issued a news release Tuesday saying it will ask the Idaho board of regents on Thursday to end discussions about the merger.

“Although we continue to see great value in University of Phoenix, it has become cost prohibitive, and potentially distracting to our other work, to continue conversations,” UI president C. Scott Green said in the release. “We respect the University of Phoenix and wish them all the best. We appreciate their commitment to these conversations, and we learned many things we may be able to incorporate into our work.”

Phoenix earlier announced the end of the effort in its own release.

“While we have decided not to move forward, we remain appreciative of President Scott Green, the leadership of the University of Idaho, and the many elected officials in Idaho who supported this process,” Chris Lynne, president of University of Phoenix, said in the release.

The proposed mega-merger was announced in June 2023 and came as a surprise to Idaho’s elected leaders.

Green touted the merger as a potential boon for the public university. In fact, school officials announced the deal in 2023 in a social media post that said the two institutions “intend, with proper approvals, to affiliate with the goal of increasing access to all learners, improving capacity for supporting all learners and helping all learners achieve their higher education goals.”

But Green apparently failed to get elected officials to share his enthusiasm.

A telling exchange of Green’s challenges occurred in 2024 when he told lawmakers that because of the nature of the deal, he had no “political mechanism” for the university to give lawmakers advance word of it, according to reporting by Idaho Education News.

House State Affairs Committee Chairman Brent Crane, R-Nampa, responded: “I have a cell phone and I have a laptop.”

Despite lobbying from the owners of University of Phoenix, and Green’s cajoling, state lawmakers never warmed to the deal.

In fact, they passed a bill in 2024 that didn’t directly mention the University of Phoenix deal, but nonetheless would have prevented its purchase if it had been in place.

House Bill 691, which was signed into law by Little, now requires state-funded agencies and institutions to notify the Legislature and local media before most purchases of $25 million or more.

Despite the blowback from lawmakers, Green said a year ago that the university will continue to search for paths to complete the acquisition.

But the issue didn’t even come up for discussions during the 2025 legislative session, according Idaho Education News.

Now both parties have to work out the breakup fees.

According to previous reports, Phoenix officials agreed to pay at least some of the costs incurred by Idaho to study the merits of the deal.

The UI received $5 million last June, to cover some of the costs of researching a potential Phoenix purchase.

In the news release on Tuesday, Green said Phoenix would pay another $12.24 million, which would fully reimburse the Vandals for costs incurred while working to close the deal.

Much of those incurred costs went to international law firm Hogan Lovells, which has headquarters in London and Washington, D.C.

Green worked as global chief operating and financial officer for Hogan Lovells until the summer of 2019 when the Idaho State Board of Education hired him as Idaho’s 19th president.

Green’s hiring of his former firm to perform due diligence on the deal was criticized by at least one Idaho lawmaker.

Green announced the Phoenix deal after the 2023 legislative session had ended. The next year, he attempted to convince lawmakers of the merits of UI’s proposal to purchase.

However, he battled concerns over whether the purchase would imperil the state’s credit rating and why Idaho should purchase a school with a bruised reputation that once had 470,000 students before it began to shed enrollment.

The announced purchase in 2023 came four years after the owners of University of Phoenix agreed to pay $191 million to settle claims made by the Federal Trade Commission that it used “deceptive advertisements falsely touting their relationships and job opportunities with companies such as AT&T, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Twitter, and The American Red Cross.”

“The monetary judgment is the highest in an FTC case involving a for-profit school,” according to the commission’s website.