Santa Ana-based Corinthian Colleges Inc., which faces the prospect of renewed federal regulation and persistant Wall Street skepticism, saw its shares fall Tuesday after its president announced his intention to resign this month.
Matt Ouimet, president and chief operating officer at the vocational school operator, said he’s leaving at the end of the month to pursue other opportunities.
Corinthian has no immediate plans to fill Ouimet’s posts.
The company’s shares closed down 7% on a market value of $520 million.
Ouimet joined Corinthian in early 2009 and took over as chief operating officer in July after Peter Waller took over as chief executive.
Before Corinthian, he worked as president of the hotel group for White Plains, N.Y.-based Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc.
Before that, Ouimet gained famed as president of the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, overseeing a marketing push for Disneyland’s 50th anniversary in 2005.
Corinthian has spent the past several months dealing with proposals from the Education Department that would fall hard on for-profit schools.
It and other for-profit school operators are under fire for students who took on more debt than they could afford.
The company gets the bulk of its revenue from students with federal loans.
Corinthian runs more than 100 campuses in the U.S. and Canada that offer degrees in healthcare, criminal justice and other areas.
The uncertainty of regulation has wreaked havoc on shares of Corinthian, which surged during the recession as idled workers sought training for new jobs.
Corinthian’s shares are down some 60% so far this year.
Also on Tuesday, an analyst for Switzerland’s UBS AG issued a report with a “neutral” rating on Corinthian, saying the stock was “cheap, but too risky for our taste.”
Corinthian’s Everest schools “generate cash but could be potentially shut down by the government,” said Ariel Sokol of UBS.
“We expect the stock to remain quite volatile in 2011,” he said. “We are less clear about the value of the company’s Everest institutions, given both existing and proposed regulations that could significantly restrict new start growth.”
