Finally ! Sudents in Calif now have the chance to get out of onerous student loans perpetrated by one
fraudulent for profit “college”.
Hopefully AG’s in other states will be proactive in advocating with the Dept of Education on behave of students who were victimized by these crooks.
“Tens of thousands of borrowers just won the right to get relief on their student loans, following the conclusion of an investigation into defunct for-profit colleges. On Tuesday, California Attorney General Kamala Harris and the U.S. Department of Education announced the end of a probe into Corinthian Colleges, a company that once owned more than 100 for-profit colleges and filed for bankruptcy in May.”
Isn’t “loan forgiveness” a euphemism for “taxpayers pay for the mess”?
So let me get this straight. The US gov’t authorized federally subsidized student loan money to be paid to a fly-by-night school which was accredited by a fly-by-night accreditation agency:
So who/what gives accreditation to the accreditation agencies? Didn’t an accreditation body also repeatedly give the thumbs up to UNC Chapelhill, despite its 2 decades long, systematic AFAM studies major fraud?
I worked for a different for profit college two years ago, not Corinthian, but I knew people who worked for them. One of my coworkers actually ended up being hired in the accreditation department right before the college was closed. He told me that the school was truly horrible and should be shut down. I also had several coworkers that escaped from Corinthian and went to work for other schools. They also had pretty negative things to say about the college.
The situation with ACICS is interesting. As an institutional researcher, at my college, I was one of the main people in charge of collecting and filing data for accreditation. We were accredited by ACICS (national) and later WASC (regional). The thing about ACICS was it was much more thorough than WASC. The hoops I had to jump through to collect and report data was significant. I had to account for every single student in our school, if they had graduated I had to give specific information on their employment (job in the field, related to field, outside the field, etc.), I had to account for every single person who left the school if they didn’t graduate. I had to account year to year, what our students were doing at the time of accreditation, what program they were in, if they had transferred to a different program, etc. It took significant time to prepare this data, it was not trivial, in fact, I didn’t have to report job placement at all to our regional accreditors (WASC) only national (ACICS).
The only way Corinthian could have passed accreditation was to lie, significantly, and according to the articles I read, lie is exactly what they did. They claimed that students were employed, when in fact, they were not. They got them temporary jobs for a day so they could state they were working. I don’t know how ACICS should have caught that. Perhaps looking for year to year changes? Had I known how easy it was to fool ACICS, maybe I could have relaxed on my own reporting. We really made an effort to have clean and reliable data. It was stressful.
At one point, CA collected a fee from for profit colleges specifically to have money in hand for schools that needed to refund students. At some point they stopped. I am not sure who should be on the hook here, but the students should get some relief because they were lied to. I assume that the school’s assets will be used for some of the government paypack. Corinthian was a publically traded company. There must be money that can be used to keep the taxpayers off the hook.
The taxpayers would’ve been on the hook for this money anyway. Corinthian certified the students to borrow money that they wouldn’t actually be able to afford to repay, because they figured who cared whether the students’ credit and lives were ruined, they’d get paid either way. A significant proportion of those borrowers would’ve never repaid the money anyway. The difference now is that their credit and lives won’t be ruined (further) by the predatory practices of this business.