John Sperling, American businessman, founded the University of Phoenix (d. 2014)
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 became part of the publicly traded Apollo Group. Sperling brought the business model of higher education to the forefront, a model that employed the scientific management of higher education to the forefront: diminishing the power and importance of labor, increasing the importance of technology, marketing and advertising, and as University of Phoenix cofounder John D. Murphy explained, maximizing profit. 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.