The Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday its first settlement with an education lead generation company, Orlando-based Expand, Inc., and its owner, Ayman “Alec” El-Difrawi, for alleged deceptive practices. The FTC contends that Expand, which operates under the names Gigats, EducationMatch and SoftRock, has been claiming to visitors to its websites that it is “pre-screening” job applicants, when in fact it is
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In recent months, leading Members of Congress, state attorneys general, and non-profit groups have called on the Department of Education to stop colleges that receive federal student aid from forcing students to resolve disputes with their schools in secret arbitration proceedings. (I’ve been active in this advocacy effort.)  After decades of neglecting this issue, the Department
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The headline of a Kansas City Star article posted today reads, “Some private for-profit schools come to the aid of former Wright Career College students; Vatterott Educational Centers, Brown Mackie College and National American University offer assistance.” The article includes this passage: One of the schools reaching out to Wright students is St. Louis-based Vatterott Educational Centers.
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  I’ve received information that Albert C. Gray, who has been the President and Chief Executive Officer of the controversial accrediting body the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), may be leaving that organization. Sunday afternoon I emailed Anthony Bieda, ACICS’s Vice President of External Affairs, asking him about this information — that his group’s
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Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey has sued troubled for-profit college giant ITT Tech for alleged deceptive practices and abuses of students in the state. Healey filed the suit last Thursday in Norfolk, MA, Superior Court, and her office disclosed the action in a press release today, which says that ITT, from 2010 to 2013, was
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I was just alerted to this gem of a tantrum / press release issued two weeks ago by the for-profit college trade association APSCU, whose strategy of aggressive, expensive lobbying and litigation has utterly failed, and which now has lost much of its funding. Having harbored as members now disgraced and shut-down schools like Corinthian,
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The U.S. Department of Education last week sent warning letters to two businesses, demanding that the companies stop using the Department’s official logos, or marks, without authorization. One of them, Arcadia, California-based MC Business Group LLC apparently has been running one of the many operations promising people help with managing their student loans, for a fee, even though, as
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The U.S. Department of Education says that at an event scheduled for today in Boston with Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. will announce that students who attended 91 former Corinthian Colleges campuses nationwide between 2010 and 2014 “have a clear path to loan forgiveness under evidence uncovered by the Department while working
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