Corinthian Colleges, with about 75,000 students in the US and Canada as well as online classes, owns 3 for-profit higher education brands: Everest College, Heald College, and WyoTech schools.
Corinthian receives $1.4B a year from federal education financing programs ($4 out of every $5 of its income).
Late last week, the company appeared headed for permanent closure, but an agreement reached Monday with DoE will allow it to stay in business with Federal oversight.
The US Department of Education has limited its access to federal funds after it failed to provide documents and other information to the agency.
That follows allegations that the company altered grades, student attendance records and falsified job-placement data used in advertisements for its schools.
[...]
The Education Department said that it heightened its oversight of the company after requesting data "multiple times" over the past five months
The company, based in Santa Ana, California, has previously been sued by California Attorney General Kamala Harris
for marketing fraud, arguing that the company mislead prospective students about how its graduates fared in the job market.
Worse, Everest officials paid nearby companies to hire their graduates for just long enough to make the school's statistics look better, then let them go. One Everest campus in Georgia paid companies $2,000 a head to keep Everest graduates on staff for 30 days.
[...]
the company will reportedly get the bridge funding it needs long enough to act on several DOE requests, including closing some of its schools and bringing in an independent auditor for its remaining operations. The DOE is weighing whether or not to reauthorize several Corinthian-owned schools for participation in the federal financial aid system, according to the Associated Press. The company will attempt to sell off significant parts of its 107-campus network.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:24PM
The title states this is a victory, and while it may be a victory for the federal government, it is a loss to everyone else. The federal government has now grown in size and requires more money and more complexity to oversee this business, rather than shut the business down permanently. If what they did was so egregious, punish them by closing them as originally planned, and let other hopefully more responsible schools fill the vacuum. Instead they grew their empire and made everything more complicated while continuing to let this bad business remain, bilking customers and taxpayers for an indeterminate amount of time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @08:34PM
The title states this is a victory
Had I been a bit more ambitious, I would have crafted my own, more-apt title, as I often do.
bilking customers and taxpayers
I was going to post my link higher in the thread, but your rhetoric is even closer to my point.
The gov't of the USA (and I'm guessing most other places) is a scheme to redirect cash to cronies and potential cronies.
It seems the best we can do is to try to assure that the dough doesn't go to complete dicks.
Going further with my point, if the Feds were to e.g. cut out the private sector on handling the money (student loans), it would cost less than half of what is currently being spent.
How The Government Could Make Public College Free For All Students [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [popularresistance.org]
There was a time in this country (in my lifetime, in fact) when people graduated from college without a monstrous debt burden.
There were generations of people who had financed their degrees with only a summer job.
In those years, the gov't picked up 80 percent of the tab and the student only needed to provide 20 percent.
In the era of Reaganomics, those numbers have been flipped.
-- gewg_