A dozen advocacy groups, including the NAACP and the Debt Collective, on Wednesday wrote to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, calling on the Biden Administration to cancel the student loan debt of borrowers who attended the for-profit Brooks Institute, which from 1999 until just before its 2016 closure was owned by for-profit giant Career Education Corp, now called Perdoceo.

Brooks offered programs in photography, filmmaking, and photo-journalism. Like other schools owned by Perdoceo, Brooks used deceptive advertising and high-pressure recruiting to enroll students in over-priced programs that left many buried in debt, without the career advancement they sought.

The letter, also signed by more than 250 former Brooks students, cites the findings of a report released this week that documents abuses at Brooks during the period that Perdoceo owned the school. The report was skillfully prepared by Ashley Pizzuti, a Debt Collective organizer and former Brooks student.

The letter asserts that the Department already knows about “a robust record of misconduct” by Brooks, and the new report offers details on Brooks’s violations, based on hundreds of pages of records from congressional testimony, civil lawsuits, law enforcement probes, and media accounts.

The report documents that Brooks misrepresented the costs of attending, facts about transferability of credits, and graduation and job placement rates, and enrolled students without regard to whether a program would help them succeed. 

According to the report, Brooks, which started as a family-run California photography school in 1945, enrolled about 22,000 students under Perdoceo’s ownership.

In a statement, Pizzuti said, “Brooks Institute borrowers have suffered long enough under the weight of deceptive practices. It’s time for the Department to act decisively and provide the relief these borrowers deserve.”

Val Montefu, whose son earned a bachelor’s degree at Brooks from 2003 to 2007, said the degree “turned out to be pretty much worthless.”  Montefu added, “The career counseling and promised leads never happened. The accreditation they claimed would lead to great jobs turned out to be nonexistent. The loans we were told would be easily paid off by our son’s guaranteed high income are still lingering and growing like a cancer due to the predatory and deceiving pressure put on us by Brooks Institute and CEC.” Montefu said the loan debt had grown from about $100,000 to over $337,000. Montefu, who is 68, said she and her husband “will die with these loans still hanging over our heads.”

The Department under President Biden has offered automatic debt cancellation — without the need for students to individually show, under the federal Borrower Defense process, that  they were harmed — to groups of students attending in specified years a number of predatory colleges, including the Art Institutes, the University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, CollegeAmerica, Westwood College, and Kaplan Career Institute. 

Other students who have individually applied under Borrower Defense have become eligible for debt relief, including under the settlement of the Sweet v. Cardona lawsuit.  But many borrowers, including former Brooks students, remain unaware of the magnitude of the Brooks scam or of their eligibility for loan relief.

Pizzuti’s report notes that Brooks borrowers have made various efforts to cancel their debts, including through individual and class-action lawsuits against Brooks, Perdoceo, and lender Sallie Mae, through the Borrowers Defense process, and other means, but none has meaningfully addressed the debt.

Other groups signing the letter to Cardona include the Project on Predatory Student Lending, Student Borrower Protection Center, The Century Foundation Higher Education Policy Team, and The Institute for College Access & Success.

As Republic Report has chronicled for over a decade, Perdoceo has been one of the worst actors in all of for-profit higher education, taking in billions of dollars from taxpayers for student grants and loans while repeatedly engaging in predatory abuses. 

Perdoceo has faced multiple law enforcement actions for predatory conduct. In 2019, the company entered into a $494 million settlement with 48 state attorneys general, plus the District of Columbia, over allegations that it engaged in widespread deceptive practices against students. Later that same year, Perdoceo agreed to pay $30 million to settle charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission that its schools have recruited students through deceptive third-party lead generation operations. In each case, the company did not admit guilt.

Recent Perdoceo employees have told media outlets USA Today and Capitol Forum, as well as Republic Report, that company recruiters have continued to feel pressure to make misleading sales pitches and to enroll low-income people into programs that aren’t strong enough to help them succeed. Some of those former employees also have spoken with federal investigators.

USA Today reported in 2022 that the U.S. Department of Education, in December 2021, requested information from Perdoceo; the Department also asked Perdoceo to retain records regarding student recruiting, marketing, financial aid practices, and more. Perdoceo confirmed the probe, while seeming to minimize its significance, in a February 2022 SEC filing. Perdoceo also acknowledged in May 2022 that it received a request for documents and information from the U.S. Justice Department.

Yet the company, despite its awful record of misconduct, has managed to stay in business. It not only changed its name from CEC to Perdoceo, it also jettisoned all its old tarnished brands like Brooks Institute and started fresh with two schools that have official-sounding names: American Intercontinental University and Colorado Technical University. 

The Department of Education provided AIU and CTU with more than $699 million in student grants and loans in the 2021-22 school year, the most recent year reported. A bachelor’s degree from CTU is priced at about $65,000.

But data released last year by the Department show that Perdoceo’s two schools, AIU and CTU, deliver poor results for students, with low graduation rates and graduate incomes and high levels of student debt.

Before joining Perdoceo, company CEO Todd Nelson ran two of the other biggest for-profit colleges operations: the University of Phoenix and now-demised Education Management Corp. Both of those chains, like Perdoceo, ran into major law enforcement issues because of deceptive recruiting practices and other abuses that occurred on Nelson’s watch.

UPDATE 10-09-24: The advocacy organization Veterans Education Success sent a letter to Secretary Cardona, dated September 19, recounting Perdoceo’s record of abuses and urging him to protect student veterans, service members, and other GI Bill beneficiaries from unfair and deceptive practices at Perdoceo / CEC schools and to provide loan relief to students who attended them.