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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: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday April 18 2015, @10:15PM
Intelligence helps but is not enough to detect fraud. Many young people can be very intelligent and at the same time very naive and inexperienced with predation, having been thoroughly sheltered by zealous parents. To detect fraud, you must also have knowledge, which requires education. And even then, you will still end up in situations where you cannot tell if the other party of a deal is honest and will keep their side of a bargain and has not misrepresented the situation or their abilities. Often the only choices are to trust them, or not, and if the decision is to trust because they seem so trustworthy or because their services are so badly needed that the lesser risk is that they aren't honest, someone has to go first to find out if they really are trustworthy. It is especially galling to have such a brave person be slandered as a chump and a dupe by the likes of you, in those cases where thanks to our adventurous soul, we all learn that the other was not trustworthy. You owe them thanks for uncovering a cheat, not scorn for being a trusting fool.
The "burned hand" method of education, which you sound like you prefer, makes everyone paranoid, hurts us all. If no one can trust anyone else, society collapses. If we can redress a situation, we should, and we often can. We don't intentionally make roads even more dangerous than they already are and then blame the drivers for whatever accidents and injuries they sustain, no. That used to be the attitude, before seat belts. But after too many needless tragedies that could have been prevented with such a simple thing as a seat belt, we got smarter. So why should we let known liars and cheats continue to do business and defraud new victims? To teach the victims a lesson by driving them into bankruptcy and ruining their lives? Harsh. Just as a fender bender should not result in serious injury or even death, neither should a fraud leave a person completely destitute, homeless and forced to panhandle for food while being mocked by smug jerks for being "stupid". Student loans are too harsh, because unlike _all_ other forms of debt, they were granted the supremely special status of not being forgivable through bankruptcy.