Attorney Clark Kent Ervin, the independent monitor for Zenith Education, a chain of career colleges, has just released his final report. Zenith was an experiment, pursued by the Department of Education, to see if a large predatory for-profit college chain that ruined many students’ lives could be purchased by a non-profit group with no
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ECMC, the student debt collection operation that took over many of the campuses of notorious, collapsed for-profit Corinthian Colleges, is in a public spat with Clark Kent Ervin, the well-regarded lawyer charged with monitoring the integrity of programs at ECMC’s education subsidiary, Zenith. The dispute — a sharp back-and-forth in written exchanges — suggests what can
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  The U.S. Department of Education announced today it has “accepted” the law firm Squire Patton Boggs as the new “independent monitor” for Zenith Education Group. Zenith is a division of the non-profit debt collection company ECMC, which, with Department approval, last year took over many Everest College and WyoTech campuses of the now-defunct, notoriously
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As approximately 900 people have kindly informed me in the past 36 hours, the CBS drama “The Good Wife” on Sunday highlighted the struggles of students seeking legal redress for abuses they suffered at the hands of high-priced, low quality for-profit colleges. I appreciated the tip, and I’m impressed to see how well “The Good Wife” brought to
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An investigative report released this morning documents how some for-profit college owners have converted their companies into non-profit schools in a way that allows them to evade the regulatory obligations and deservedly bad reputation of for-profits while continuing to reap enormous financial benefits.  These operators have done so, the report finds, by subverting the rules governing non-profit schools, while the
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A lawyer for shut-down Corinthian Colleges has written to a U.S. Justice Department lawyer investigating the for-profit college company, warning that some school records may be “abandoned” as soon as next month. The June 29 letter, obtained by Republic Report, opens a window into the Corinthian litigation, and also highlights questions about the U.S. Department of Education’s decision to
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In a floor speech today, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said he was “troubled” that ECMC, the debt collection company that has acquired more than 50 campuses of collapsing for-profit college chain Corinthian, is “already, just weeks into owning and operating these schools, failing to live up to the promises they made to the students and to me.”
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Student loan debt collection company ECMC has just begun its takeover of 56 campuses of the failed, predatory for-profit Corinthian Colleges. But already, assurances from both federal government officials and ECMC itself regarding protections for students in the deal appear to have been highly misleading. A brand-new Everest College enrollment agreement, seen by Republic Report, combined with
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