Strayer University
private, for-profit university in the United States
Strayer University is a private for-profit university headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1892 as Strayer's Business College and later became Strayer College, before being granted university status in 1998.
Strayer University operates under the publicly traded holding company Strategic Education, Inc., which was established in 1996 and rebranded in 2018 following its merger with Capella University.
Strayer enrolls more than 50,000 students through both its online learning programs and 35 campuses located throughout 14 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. with an additional location in Auckland, New Zealand. It offers in degree programs for working adults and offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in accounting, business administration, criminal justice, education, health services administration, information technology and public administration.
History
19th century
Siebert Irving Strayer founded Strayer's Business College in Baltimore in 1892. Strayer established the college to teach business skills to former farm workers, including shorthand, typing and accounting. Thomas W. Donoho joined the school in 1902.
In its first decade of operations, enrollment at the school gradually increased, attracting students from other states.
20th century
In 1904, Strayer opened a branch of the school in Washington, D.C.
Enrollment further expanded as demand for trained accountants grew after the passage of the Revenue Act of 1913 and World War I increased the need for federal government clerks with office skills. During the 1930s, the college was authorized to grant collegiate degrees in accountancy by the Washington, D.C., board of education.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Strayer University” as private, for-profit university in the United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as private, for-profit university in the United States. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7622587. VIAF identifies the subject as 128044112. The Library of Congress control number is n2004014340. Authority coordinates are 38.810, -77.112. 6 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1892, 1998, 1996 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Strayer University” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.