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The US Department of Education reports
The U.S. Department of Education took additional steps [April 14] to protect students and taxpayers and crack down on abuses within the for-profit sector by continuing its enforcement actions against Corinthian Colleges Inc. After a comprehensive review, the U.S. Department of Education has confirmed cases of misrepresentation of job placement rates to current and prospective students in Corinthian's Heald College system. The Department found 947 misstated placement rates and informed the company it is being fined about $30 million.
Specifically, the Department has determined that Heald College's inaccurate or incomplete disclosures were misleading to students; that they overstated the employment prospects of graduates of Heald's programs; and that current and prospective students of Heald could have relied upon that information as they were choosing whether to attend the school. Heald College provided the Department and its accreditors this inaccurate information as well.
The Department has also notified Corinthian it intends to deny Corinthian's pending applications to continue to participate in the Title IV federal student aid programs at its Heald Salinas and Stockton locations. Corinthian has 14 days to respond to the Department's notice, after which the Department will issue its final decision. Moreover, the Department has determined that Heald College is no longer allowed to enroll students and must prepare to help its current students either complete their education or continue it elsewhere.
The "Corinthian 15" debt strikers of February became the Corinthian 100 in late March with students refusing to pay back loans made under fraudulent conditions. Nine states' attorneys general agree that the bad loans should be forgiven.
Cable News Network notes
"Corinthian took advantage of students who were trying to build a better life for themselves and their families" said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.
[...]Tuition and fees for some of its programs cost more than five times those at other public colleges, according to the [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau]. A bachelor's degree cost up to $75,000 and an associate's was as much as $43,000.
Corinthian was so expensive that many students needed to take out both federal loans and private loans to cover the cost. The college offered its own private loans, which came with interest rates sometimes twice as high as federal loans.
Related:
Federal Crackdown On For-Profit Colleges Claims Its First Victory
Update: Corinthian Colleges Will Sell Half its Campuses to Nonprofit Loan Servicer
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday April 18 2015, @07:35PM
The idea is that the people who made the bad investment did it after being deceived as to the value of the product being offered. If you buy a diamond and get a granite pebble, you've been defrauded and normally the law tends to go after whoever does the defrauding so they won't keep doing it. The kind of people who were victimized by these colleges aren't in a position to evaluate how good the product is, because they know little about education other than society as a whole sends the message that more education is the key to a better life.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @07:40PM
If you can't evaluate a product or service that you're considering buying, especially one costing tens of thousands of dollars, then it should be obvious that you shouldn't be spending your money on this product or service.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @07:50PM
You're trying to evaluate the education you need in order to make the determination of whether or not the education you're about to purchase is worth it...
Your logic makes as much sense as: I need this job to gain experience which I need to apply for this job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @07:56PM
No, it's different. In order to consume an education, one needs to already have some intellectual abilities. These abilities will exist prior to receiving any education. The education just enhances what's already there. The basic level of intellectual ability needed prior to pursuing an education should render one able to determine if an opportunity is obviously bad. If these people lack this basic raw intellect, then any education, regardless of how or where they receive it, will be a waste.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @08:36PM
In order to consume an education
You don't "consume" an education anymore than you "consume" data. This is some terrifying corporate propaganda right here.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @08:48PM
If you've learned something from this thread then you owe us $14,329.87. We'll email your certificate to the same address registered to your PayPal account. Don't forget to apply for our "Thread Master's Program" where we offer mod points and a starting karma position of 10 points (12 points if you get your loan through our DIY Debt program course offering). Learn from your mistakes, at Corinthian!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Saturday April 18 2015, @10:13PM
Smart people do stupid shit all the time as soon as they get out of the area in which they have knowledge or skill. This why people look for accreditation when choosing a school, or board certification when choosing a neurologist, or any such certification in any area, because no matter how brilliant a person is, that person can't know everything in the world. We use these certifications as a guideline and rationally so, otherwise we could never do anything at all because our time would be so wholly wasted. Corinthian committed fraud in obtaining accreditation and so it is Corinthian which is the bad actor here. All of those loans should be taken out of Corinthian's hide because it was the fraudster, and but for that fraud, those loans wouldn't have been made.
Anyway, feels like a Corinthian executive wants to use SN to bitch about being busted. Tough shit buddy.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday April 19 2015, @10:46AM
My point was about experience - people who go to for-profit colleges have no real-world experience with education alternatives and don't have the background to evaluate how good or bad the educational product offered actually is.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @07:49PM
I've been behind these people at the grocery store, waiting while they're paying for their groceries with welfare chits.
They always have the latest iPhone, or maybe one revision back at worst.
They're chattering away on their iPhones, talking about how they saw on Facebook that one of their "baby daddies" was "cheating" on them.
They clearly have Internet access if they can access Facebook.
So if they can access Facebook, they can access Google.
If they can access Google, they can search for information about these private colleges before forking over big wads of cash.
But they don't do this.
They aren't victims.
They just don't use their brains.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Sunday April 19 2015, @12:31AM
Payday loans offer spectacularly bad deals to borrowers. Many borrowers become trapped in a cycle of debt because of the punitive terms for those who are unable to repay the debt in time. Yet the people who borrow are often desperate, and the alternative is loan sharks.
Should such loans be legal, or not?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday April 19 2015, @01:58AM
I shudder at disgust every time I pass one of those merchants of misery.
One even has a logo that at first glance, looks like a crown... but when you look closer, its a pair of handcuffs.
And they ain't cheap either!!! ( 1 page .pdf ) [paydaymoneycenters.com]
I really feel for anyone forced to visit these places, and because these places exist, people are often forced to use them.
I guess I am trying to say is one should not buy something they can't pay for, and people who have something to sell should not sell to people who can't afford to buy it. We already have way too much price inflation because sellers know the buyers can be led to patronize financial institutions for a quick cash settlement that will meet the seller's asking price. Nowhere is this more glaringly obvious than house prices. We have all this price inflation because people are so willing to mortgage their futures for today's handshake and sign-off. Without all this extra liquidity injected into the economy as debt, buyers would have to exert restraint on purchases, as well as sellers also have to exert restraint on asking prices.
The bankers are making a mint out of all this misery. They never had the money to loan in the first place. They just created a note, and now expect real usury on funds they simply penned into existence. I, for one, am really fed up with our Government's cozying up to these people, giving them charter to counterfeit our currency system for profit.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2015, @05:04AM
> I shudder at disgust every time I pass one of those merchants of misery.
There is more to it than that.
These articles were written by a professor studying urban poverty who actually went and worked as a teller on a weekly basis and at a non-profit predatory loan help hotline in order to get direct personal experience of how it works in real life:
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-high-cost-for-the-poor-of-using-a-bank [newyorker.com]
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-good-are-payday-loans [newyorker.com]
I think the prevalence of payday loan places is an indictment of how credit unions have failed to fill the gap -- they talk about community, but too many of them are operated like banks, nickle-and-diming people who aren't 'profitable' when they should be helping them out. Its one of the reasons I opened an account at a community bank the last time I moved -- all of the local CUs were behaving like banks so I figured I would skip the pretense.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Sunday April 19 2015, @06:38AM
Interesting links...
I wonder if the "payday loan" companies did not exist, then if the landlord hikes the rent, he has to make evictions because the people can't go into debt to pay the hike. Is not even the availability of selling oneself into debt the cause of us doing it, simply because others can economically force the issue?
I keep seeing prices spiraling higher and higher, despite mass outsourcing of employment. For now, it seems like people are willingly going into debt so as to meet the seller's price. I, for one, would love to see this end-around-carry by going into debt stop, and when sellers hike price, sales stop. The buyers are the ones who set the price anyway, and if they are kept from bidding the prices up, this will stop. In addition, it will put pressure on lawmakers to not exact tax from the lowest segments of the economy, as those are the ones actually spending 100% of what they get to local businessmen. Every dollar taken from a minimum wage worker is a dollar taken from the till of a merchant. Once the merchants begin lobbying Congress, we will see Congress having to do some serious reform.
We can only live on debt for so long, then there is no longer money to pay for interest, and the thing folds back in on itself. Its a really nasty little illusion of wealth.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday April 19 2015, @10:48AM
The existence of usurious loans in society points to other problems. You can ask many such questions. Why does a society like ours have government-sponsored gambling? Why can a drug company profit from the misery and poverty of sick people for twenty years, and finally have to give up their patent on a drug, then make a minor change that stops the drug from becoming generic? And so on. Why do we, as a society, consider preying on the weak and vulnerable to be acceptable?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)