College Owner Returns to Board of Accreditor That Placed Her School on Warning
A for-profit college owner whose schools were in direct violation of the rules of their accreditor, ACCSC, has returned to a seat on the board of that accreditor after only a brief absence.
Carol Palacios, executive director of Miami’s Atlantis University, was serving as chair of the commission at ACCSC around the time that board voted to place Atlantis on “warning” status in October 2023, citing extensive evidence of violations — just after another school operated by Palacios, Florida Palms University, voluntarily closed as it was facing review by ACCSC. Palacios stopped being the ACCSC chair in that period but remained a commission member until 2024. Now she is once again an ACCSC commission member.
College owners and executives regularly serve on accrediting commissions, despite concerns that more independent overseers might provide greater accountability. But it seems remarkable that Palacios is again an ACCSC commissioner, because ACCSC so recently concluded that Palacios’s school appeared out of compliance with ACCSC standards.
ACCSC declares that in considering new candidates for board members, also called commissioners, it will, among other factors, consider the candidate’s “[a]ffiliation with any school that has lost or been denied accreditation by any accrediting agency, been issued a Warning or Probation by any accrediting agency, entered into bankruptcy, or closed.” ACCSC also says it considers a candidate’s “[p]erformance and commitment with respect to… Providing quality education to students….Ethical, fair, and honest practice; and… Compliance with accrediting standards and applicable federal, state, and local requirements…”
Palacios, who saw one of her schools issued an ACCSC warning just as she closed another school, seems to fall short of those considerations.
Palacios did not respond to a request for comment. But Michale McComis, ACCSC’s Chief Executive Officer, did. He told me last week that Palacios is “filling a vacancy appointment” because another commission member resigned. McComis said Palacios will serve for two meetings this year and then go off the commission again.
As to whether the issues of Palacios’s schools’ apparent noncompliance suggest she might not be the appropriate pick, McComis said her schools’ issues “were resolved” and that she “has served with distinction and has been a very good commissioner.”
It is unusual generally for former commission chairs to quickly return to an accreditor board, but ACCSC rules do provide that, in the event of a vacancy, commissioners elect a replacement “from among former Commissioners, irrespective of the date that their terms ended.”
Still, to uphold its standards, ACCSC could have found a replacement commissioner whose school had not so recently been issued a warning and been confronted with extensive evidence of violations. The decision to return Palacios to the board sends a confusing message to schools regarding ACCSC’s commitment to uphold rules aimed at protecting students and the taxpayers who fund student aid.
Perhaps McComis is right that Palacios as a commissioner was good at overseeing other schools. But according to ACCSC itself, she was not so good at overseeing her own school.
Republic Report reported in July 2023 that Atlantis, which is owned by Palacios’s family and offers programs in business, computer science, health, engineering, education, and English language instruction, appeared to be in violation of ACCSC standards, and corresponding U.S. Department of Education regulations, governing the use of “branch campuses” tied to a school’s central campus. The rules prohibit branch campuses from being housed at the same location as a main school, but Florida Palms University, designated as a branch, was operating in the same place as Atlantis.
At the time, McComis told me that ACCSC was “aware” that the two schools were operating in the same building “for the time being.”
About three weeks after our report, Florida Palms, according to a subsequent letter from McComis, “notified ACCSC of the school’s intent to voluntarily withdraw from ACCSC accreditation,” effective that day. That notification came at the start of the week that ACCSC was set to meet and address Florida Palms’ application for renewal of accreditation. On September 8, 2023, Atlantis told the accreditor that it was closing Florida Palms. Days after that, Florida Palms announced on its website that it had “voluntarily ceased operations.”
In October 2023, ACCSC, by a vote of its commission members, placed Atlantis University on “warning status,” an action that barred the school from starting new academic programs or opening new locations pending a further review that could have led to stronger sanctions. The decision was announced in a letter from McComis to Palacios that declared, “Despite the voluntary withdrawal of accreditation and the subsequent closure of Florida Palms University, Atlantis University bears the responsibility for Florida Palms University’s compliance with accrediting standards and for the information submitted to the Commission in the OER [on-site evaluation report] response.”
The version of the letter to Palacios that ACCSC posted online was heavily redacted — about 5 1/2 of its 9 pages were blacked out. What was left readable included McComis’s claim that ACCSC approved the co-location of the two schools “with the explicit understanding that the school intended to move to a different, permanent location within 9 to 12 months.” When we reported on the matter, the schools had been in the same building for about a year.
The McComis letter further reported that ACCSC officials conducted a visit to Florida Palms in April 2023 in connection with the branch’s application for renewed accreditation. The subsequent report on that visit, filed in June 2023, was apparently troubling. According to McComis’s letter, “it appears that the school’s managers were ill-prepared for the on-site evaluation. The school was unable to produce documentation and, in some cases, produced multiple versions of documents, which the on-site evaluation team found did not provide a definitive showing of compliance with accrediting standards in several areas.”
The questions raised by the site visit, according to McComis, included “the co-location of Florida Palms University with the Atlantis University, the adequacy of the management team, faculty qualifications, tuition policies, and the accuracy of the catalog and advertising in representing the school’s approved programs, admissions process, transfer of credit policies, educational delivery method, and name of the school.”
At the August 2023 ACCSC meeting, the letter continued, the ACCSC commissioners found that Florida Palms’ response to the visit findings “appears to contain several discrepancies and did not fully demonstrate compliance with certain accrediting standards over the term of Florida Palms University’s operation.” In particular, the Commission found that Florida Palms “did not satisfactorily address questions regarding management, faculty qualifications, recordkeeping, representation of the school through catalog and advertising, admissions procedures, leaves of absence, accepting transfer credit, cessation of program approval, and professional development.”
“The nature and content of the response” from Florida Palms, McComis wrote to Palacios, “created an impression that the branch was not adequately managed and called into question the accuracy of the records provided.”
(While these specific findings seem useful, despite all the redactions, for understanding ACCSC’s decision to place Atlantis on warning, ACCSC has subsequently decided to stop publishing such warning letters at all; now, when a school is put on warning by ACCSC, the public can see only a short summary of the reasons for the action — an unfortunate move away from transparency regarding taxpayer-funded schools.)
Our July 2023 article noted that ACCSC standards and Department of Education regulations also require that a branch campus “have its own faculty and administrative or supervisory organization.” But LinkedIn listed 177 employees at Atlantis University and appeared to list zero employees at Florida Palms University. It looked as if Atlantis might be trying to use an improper backdoor to launch a new school or brand without having to wait years for approval to get federal financial aid from the Department of Education and approval to enroll international students under the Homeland Security department’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP).
The sharply negative reaction by the ACCSC visitors to Florida Palms University in April 2023 stood in remarkable contrast to the outcome of ACCSC’s last review of Atlantis University — located in the very same building and with many of the same personnel — which resulted in a five-year renewal of Atlantis’s accreditation in December 2022.
ACCSC’s decision to place Atlantis on warning in October 2023 came at a time when the accreditor had been under unusual scrutiny by the Biden Department of Education for shortcomings in overseeing bad-behaving colleges, such as the predatory, now-shuttered Center for Excellence in Higher Education schools. ACCSC, as a result, had to fight its own battle for renewal as a Department-recognized accreditor. The Department, in May 2023, ultimately renewed ACCSC, but for less than a maximum term and after extensively criticizing the accreditor.
But Atlantis apparently addressed all of ACCSC’s new concerns in prompt fashion. In early 2024, ACCSC removed Atlantis from its posted list of schools on warning status.
ACCSC is the largest accreditor focused on U.S. for-profit colleges; it achieved that status after the U.S. Department of Education, after a long struggle, in 2022 denied the application of another big for-profit accreditor, ACICS, to be renewed as a recognized accreditor, and ACICS decided to shut down.
An accreditor needs recognition by the education department in order for the schools it oversees to be eligible to receive funding from the federal student grants and loans that are the lifeblood of many colleges and universities.