Credit Suisse got the attention of Wall Street last week when it issued a report recommending that investors buy shares in one of the largest for-profit college companies, DeVry Education Group. The report came less than a week after the Federal Trade Commission sued DeVry for allegedly misleading students about job placement rates and salaries for the school’s graduates,
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Last week, troubled for-profit college company ITT Tech settled a series of lawsuits brought by shareholders that charged ITT with various securities law violations.  Under the agreement, approved preliminarily by Manhattan federal judge J. Paul Oetken on Jan. 29 but still subject to objections by investors, ITT will pay lawyers for the plaintiffs $1.1 million and commit
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In a well-publicized 2012 action, the attorneys general of 20 U.S. states stopped a company called QuinStreet from using a military-branded website, GIBill.com, to steer American veterans to controversial for-profit colleges. But it turns out that marketers, including QuinStreet itself, have continued to engage in similar practices since then. Websites such as Military.com and GIJobs.com still push
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A federal whistleblower lawsuit against troubled ITT Tech, unsealed last week, reads like a greatest hits of abuses by America’s predatory for-profit colleges.  The suit alleges that ITT has repeatedly defrauded taxpayers by taking billions of dollars in federal student aid while systematically deceiving students and violating federal regulations. The complaint, first described today by MarketWatch,
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The unprecedented Powerball jackpot is supposed to bestow extraordinary riches upon the long-awaited winners. But did you know that each of the three winners will receive less over a 29-year payout than ten U.S. for-profit college companies receive from your tax dollars every single year?  Worse, seven of those ten colleges have been under investigation in recent
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Rohit Chopra, whose principled and determined leadership helped make the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a strong force in addressing the abuses of predatory for-profit colleges, has joined the U.S. Department of Education as a senior adviser. Chopra is working directly for Under Secretary Ted Mitchell, focusing on protections for students, analysis of financial capacity and
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With Donald Graham yielding to his son-in-law the CEO spot at his company, which owns for-profit Kaplan University, and with and the University of Phoenix this week putting itself up for sale, perhaps to private equity investors closely tied to President Obama (see below), where is the stability in the leadership of America’s large predatory for-profit colleges?
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The Republican ex-congressman who now works as the chief lobbyist for the troubled for-profit college industry has ushered in the new year with an email asking for-profit college owners to finance a legal brief aimed at limiting the legal risk of companies in fraud cases.  The amount that Steve Gunderson, CEO of the industry trade
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