John Sperling

John Glen Sperling (January 9, 1921 – August 22, 2014) was an American businessman who is credited with having led the contemporary for-profit education movement in the United States. The fortune he amassed was based on his founding of the for-profit University of Phoenix for working adults in 1976, which is now part of the publicly traded Apollo Group. For ventures ranging from pet cloning to green energy, he has widely been described as an "eccentric" self-made man by the Washington Post and other media.

Sperling was born to a poor sharecropper family in the Missouri Ozarks. His father worked for the railroad and his mother was a fundamentalist Christian. He spent several years as a sailor in the merchant marine, and even as a wandering 1950s beatnik. He received his undergraduate education at Reed College, Oregon, a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley under the G.I. Bill, and then went on to read for a Ph.D. in economic history at King's College, Cambridge. His doctorate thesis examined 18th-century English mercantile history.

Apollo Group (NASDAQ: APOL) is an S&P 500 corporation based in the South Phoenix area of Phoenix, Arizona. Apollo Group, Inc., through its subsidiaries, owns several for-profit educational institutions.

Apollo was founded by John Sperling in 1973. Sperling founded the University of Phoenix in his 50s with no investors and no track record in businesses while facing what he described in his biography as "mean-spirited" opposition from accreditation agencies, competitors, and the press.

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