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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, Informative) by hemocyanin on Saturday April 18 2015, @10:04PM
You clearly don't comprehend fraud.
If they had been told "this education is 2x most other schools, and you have a 10% chance of getting a job in your chosen field on graduation" -- then yeah, I could buy the idea that the students made a bad choice. That didn't happen here -- the students were induced to make what appeared to be a rational decision by Corinthian's fraud. That's a totally different situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @10:08PM
If the student believed those claims without verifying them independently, and then voluntarily paid the school a huge sum of money, then it was the student who fucked up. The student fucked up first by not verifying the claims, and once again by paying out a large sum of money without having verified the claims.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday April 18 2015, @10:27PM
You are a total retard, or a Corinthian exec.
Seriously, I'm not trolling. Your position is that all people should have the absolute ability to accurately evaluate everything in the world: cars, airplanes, schools, medical diagnoses, GPG source code, whether a piece of lettuce has e. coli on it or not, etc. etc.
Back when our technology consisted of broken rocks, it might have been possible for a person to be a total expert on all human knowledge. But we've moved on and that means that you have to trust accreditations, certifications, standard/testing agencies, and so forth because there is no fucking way that in one lifetime, you could personally evaluate everything you buy -- you'd have every piece of food you eat under a microscope so before you even make it outside, you've probably spent half your day just looking at your food to make sure it is safe from surface contaminants. Anyway, you can take your moronic buyer beware attitude back to the stone age where that might have been possible, and let the rational people realize that the much more economic and utilitarian answer to fraud, is not to tell people they should learn to be experts on everything and suck it up if they fail, but is to punish the fraudulent fuckers when they get caught.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @10:42PM
No, I'm not affiliated with any college. I just support the notion that irresponsible people who make really fucking dumb decisions should have to face the consequences of those dumb decisions.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Saturday April 18 2015, @10:50PM
Caveat Idioti? Carpe dimes? Moron Labia? There were just asking for it. Semper Fraudulatus!