Laureate Education has moved its headquarters to Miami after transitioning to remote work during the coronavirus pandemic.
The company, which once operated 71 private universities in 25 countries, has sold its interests in recent years and has shrunk to five universities in Mexico and Peru.
Smith said the company decided to work fully remotely after sending employees home from the former offices on three floors of the 650 Exeter St. building to work there in March 2020. It vacated that property earlier this year.
“We never went back to the office,” Smith said. “We have developed a teleworking policy over many months. We have found that our corporate workforce has adapted very well to working remotely.”
Laureate was formed out of Sylvan Learning Corp., a tutoring business that Maryland native Douglas Becker and business partners acquired in 1991. Over the years, Sylvan has become known as a pioneer in franchise-based private tuition and has expanded into other educational services, including test preparation and a network of international universities.
Laureate, which began with a university in 1999 in hopes of expanding access to education in underserved parts of the world, expanded significantly by 2017 and employed more than 67,000 people worldwide. At the time, it had the largest global network of degree-granting colleges and employed more than 1,100 people at its Baltimore headquarters and an office in Columbia.
However, its growth trajectory has been bumpy, leaving the company more than $4 billion in debt after it was bought out by private equity in 2007, expanded rapidly and went public in 2017. Becker left the company just months after going public, and in 2018 it began selling some of its schools.
By January 2020, the company began reviewing each of its businesses for a possible sale or spin-off. It was then agreed to sell the activities in Australia and New Zealand as well as in the USA, Chile and Brazil. In any case, the decision to sell was based on commercial, geopolitical, regulatory and market factors, Eilif Serck-Hanssen, President and CEO of Laureate, said in an announcement.
On Thursday, Miami-based company Laureate released second-quarter financial results and reported a profit of $43.6 million for the three months ended June 30, resulting in a loss of $29.2 million for the second quarter 2021, which it attributed to a loss on cancellation debt. The company’s revenue rose 18% to $385.4 million.
