In the tumult of 2020, King’s enrollment plummeted along with funding, at a time when the school desperately needed both, according to a former staff member who left in December. In addition to battling the nationwide drop in college attendance, admissions officers had to prove to parents that New York City was safe when headlines in conservative news outlets especially began reporting a crime wave.
At the same time, donors began pulling out, believing King’s to be either too far right politically or not right wing enough, the former staff member said. Donors wanted more assurance that King’s could become self-sustaining.
A board member who has since died reportedly introduced the school to Canadian Christian businessman Peter Chung, a donor to Cru in Canada and CEO of Primacorp Ventures, which had experience marketing online programs for dozens of campuses.
Desperation appears to have pushed then-King’s President Tim Gibson to agree to an unusual deal with Primacorp in April 2021. According to a former staff member who read the agreement, Primacorp would take over fundraising, marketing and admissions for the college and collect 95% of tuition coming from students attending online, which has been a financial boon for many schools. Primacorp was also given the ability to nominate four of nine trustees to King’s board, according to tax documents.
Gibson, who resigned in August 2022, could not be reached for comment.
Stockwell Day, a former Canadian politician who once consulted for Primacorp, took over as interim president. Day became chairman of the board of trustees at King’s in October 2021.
In September, Day announced that Primacorp would help King’s launch an online program for the 2023-2024 school year and recruit 6,000 remote students within five years. Two months later, Day announced layoffs, a tuition hike and other “rightsizing” measures.
Former staff members and faculty describe the Primacorp takeover as chaotic and a waste of funds. Primacorp hired dozens of staffers in 2021 to market four online majors but laid off almost all of them within two years.
Two fundraising staff were tasked to raise $12 million without a budget to do so.
Sophia Coston, a King’s alumna hired by Primacorp to start an alumni relations department, said she also never received a budget. She said it became common for staff to use their personal credit cards for expenses and then file for reimbursements that could take months.
“We tried to ask questions, and they just weren’t being answered. And so we had to kind of fight our way through a plan anyway,” Coston said. She left in January.
As King’s tries to stave off closure, Chung has stepped in with a $2 million interest-free loan as King’s awaits the release of that amount in pandemic-related government assistance.
An independent audit shows that King’s received a $10 million line of credit from an investment firm affiliated with Primacorp, which is secured to the college’s only property, a former hotel in lower Manhattan purchased in 2018 for $19 million. That building is now reported to be for sale, and students moved out of the building over the summer. However, one former staff member said at least one potential buyer’s offer was made that no one followed up on.
Many compare the period of Primacorp’s involvement at King’s with the company’s 2020 agreement with Quest University in Canada, in which Primacorp agreed to provide similar services in exchange for ownership of land and buildings at the school to then lease back. But Primacorp stopped providing those services, and Quest is scheduled to close this year, with its real estate assets priced at about $18 million more than Primacorp paid.
Chung also faces accusations of misleading students and lying about the accreditation of the for-profit CDI College in Canada owned by Eminata Group, a company owned by Chung, and a school he owned in California that closed in 1993. Chung didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Faculty members say grades and classwork don’t seem to matter to students anymore.
Myrian Garcia, a graduating senior at King’s, said the mood on campus has been dropping since the summer when Gibson resigned. She’s worried that if the college closes, she will have to talk about it in job interviews.
“It’s a little daunting,” she said. “I just know if they look up The King’s College on Google or something, articles about King’s are going to pop up.”
This article originally appeared here.
