The Federal Trade Commission may be ready to get tough with America’s for-profit colleges. That makes sense. The agency’s core mission is “to prevent business practices that are anticompetitive or deceptive or unfair to consumers.”  The business model of many for-profit colleges is built on deception — if students actually had all the relevant information,
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Last Thursday, California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, sued Corinthian Colleges, one of the country’s biggest — and worst — for-profit college companies, for “false and predatory advertising, intentional misrepresentations to students, securities fraud and unlawful use of military seals in advertisements.” Harris’s lawsuit claims that Corinthian, which operates the schools Heald, Everest, and Wyotech, deceived prospective students, investors, and
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The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, or APSCU, is the Washington, DC-based lobbying group for America’s for-profit colleges. APSCU has opposed a wide range of reasonable efforts by the Obama Administration and Members of Congress to hold bad actors in its industry accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse with the roughly $32 billion
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The main trade association of for-profit colleges, APSCU, seems to exist for the purpose of protecting the worst, most abusive, most predatory conduct by its member companies. Why else would the association, once again last week, attack the U.S. Department of Education for seeking to implement a law that simply requires career colleges that receive
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Corinthian Colleges announced today that Leon Panetta, until recently the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and Marc Morial, President and CEO of the National Urban League, have joined the for-profit college company’s board of directors. In a field marked by ripoffs of students and taxpayers, Corinthian, which operates under the school names Everest, Heald, and Wyotech, has
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Several years of public scrutiny have exposed that many of America’s for-profit colleges are playing a cruel joke on students and taxpayers — high-priced, low-quality programs, sold through deceptive recruiting practices, that often leave students without good jobs and deep in debt. This scam has cost taxpayers as much as $33 billion in a single year. Worse, it
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Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley says she’s expanded her investigation of whether for-profit colleges have deceived students in her state about their prices, graduation rates, and job placement records. “The more we look, the more we see it as a real problem,” Coakley told the Boston Globe. Coakley identified one school she’s probing — American Career Institute (ACI),
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