Swiss international education company EF Education First has suddenly become a major player on the L.A. education stage.
Last week, EF Education First and American Jewish University announced a deal for EF to buy AJU’s 35-acre campus in Bel Air for an undisclosed price. EF said it intends to turn the campus into a school for the teaching of languages to international students.
Also last week, EF Education First opened a boarding school primarily for international students on a 16-acre parcel in Pasadena it purchased four years ago and that had been the former campus of William Carey International University.
The giant family-owned education company, based in Lucerne, Switzerland, eventually plans to host roughly 1,000 mostly international students on each campus. The company, which was founded in 1965 by Bertil Hult, a college dropout from Sweden, also has campuses in San Diego, San Francisco and Santa Barbara. Worldwide, it has more than 51,000 employees – including faculty – at campuses and other facilities in 120 countries.
In February, American Jewish University announced it was putting its Bel Air campus up for sale to raise funds to expand its educational offerings and maintain its much larger 2700-acre Brandeis Bardin campus in Simi Valley.
AJU, which had changed its name from the University of Judaism when it merged with the Brandeis Bardin Institute in 2007, had occupied the Bel Air campus since 1977. But in recent years enrollment had declined, prompting the university to consider other options for the campus. Given its location overlooking the top of the Sepulveda Pass, the campus sale was expected to raise tens of millions of dollars – if not more – for AJU.
On September 13, AJU’s board voted to accept EF Education First’s offer, though financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
EF Education First said it plans to turn the campus into an international language education center, keeping the major physical assets of the campus largely intact.
“We are a family-owned international educational organization with the mission to open the world through education,” EF Education First Chief Administrative Officer Martha Doyle said in the statement. “We plan to use the property for an EF International Language Campus, similar to schools we currently run in Pasadena and San Diego, which will bring students from more than 75 countries together to learn English through a fully-accredited program.”
