Federal prosecutors in Miami announced Wednesday that they had charged 25 people — including the owners of South Florida for-profit colleges — with selling fraudulent nursing degree diplomas and transcripts to people seeking licenses and jobs as nurses. Collectively, the defendants charged in federal documents facilitated the distribution of more than 7,600 fake nursing diplomas
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The Arkansas Times revealed Tuesday that a non-profit organization affiliated with the University of Arkansas System has been in talks about acquiring the University of Phoenix, long one of the country’s largest for-profit colleges, from that school’s current private equity owners. A spokesman for the University of Arkansas System acknowledged to the news outlet that
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The University of Phoenix has been running a national advertising campaign that suggests to prospective students that the school is a public, state-operated institution, when in fact is a private, for-profit operation.  The ads, therefore, seem to violate a 2019 settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission in which the school’s owners agreed that their
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In recent weeks we’ve seen more predatory for-profit colleges falling apart.  Once again it will be a challenge for the U.S. Department of Education, state authorities, and others concerned about students to help the current students at these schools find new colleges or get some of their money back.  — San Antonio-based Quest College abruptly
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On April 27, 2021, Dorothy McCarty, a financial aid advisor at Independence University, an online career college, met via Zoom with investigators from the United States Department of Education to discuss what McCarty considered to be unethical abuses of students, largely low-income people, by the school, which was owned by the Utah-based non-profit Center for
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Faced with the increasing likelihood that it will be forced to shut down, New York-based for-profit ASA College has left students in turmoil, providing confusing messages about transfer options, refusing to refund tuition, adding new charges to student bills, and seeming to recruit and enroll new students even as it appears likely they will not
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A recorded message sent from a corporate headhunter to various people in the for-profit college industry is getting attention from some industry members, because it is apparently an unusual use of so-called robocalling. The recording also presents in stark terms the kind of mercenary activity that is taking place with taxpayer-funded higher education dollars. In
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The U.S. Department of Education last month determined that one of the country’s major accreditors of colleges and universities is out of compliance with numerous federal regulations. It also directed the accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACS), to provide more information regarding its oversight of Florida-based Keiser University and
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