For-Profit Colleges

Has the country’s second largest for-profit higher education company, Education Management Corporation (EDMC) deceived prospective students, employers, and investors by disclosing a significantly higher set of job placement rates to them than it reports to its regulators?

That is one of the key allegations made in a lawsuit brought by a former EDMC admissions director that a U.S. District Court judge has just allowed to proceed.

Jason Sobek, who served as a Project Associate Director of Admissions for EDMC Online Higher Education’s South University brand from June 2008 to November 2010, filed the lawsuit under the Federal False Claims Act. He is seeking the return to the government of millions of dollars in federal student aid funds that he says EDMC improperly obtained by falsely certifying that it was in compliance with U.S. Department of Education regulations.

The suit says that EDMC had “two sets of books regarding job placements” – one that it used to recruit students and impress investors and employers, and another one that it reported to accrediting agencies and state regulators. According to the lawsuit, EDMC “artificially inflated” the first rate by excluding a large number of graduates from its calculations – including “single, stay-at-home parents” and those who were working in fields unrelated from what they studied. The lawsuit cites an internal “Career Services Statistical Reporting Procedures” memo that acknowledges that certain categories of graduates are “counted differently” in the different disclosures the company makes.

This is not the first time that EDMC has been accused of misleading prospective students about its record of placing graduates into jobs. In September 2010, Kathleen Bittel, a then-career service advisor at EDMC’s Art Institute of Pittsburgh testified at a U.S. Senate hearing about tricks she said the company played to inflate its job placement rates. Among other things, she said EDMC put tremendous pressure on employees to persuade graduates to verify that they were working in the fields in which they trained even when it was abundantly clear that they weren’t. EDMC repeatedly denied Bittel’s allegations.

The company has not yet responded definitively to Sobek’s charges. However, in its motion to dismiss the case, EDMC argued that reporting different rates to prospective students and accrediting agencies is not unlawful. “Even if true,” the company wrote, the Department of Education “never required that marketing statistics be calculated one particular way.”

Education Department regulations do, however, prohibit colleges from deliberately misleading students to get them to enroll.

EDMC may soon have to address the allegations more directly. That’s because late last month Judge Terrence F. McVerry of the Federal District Court in the Western District of Pennsylvania rejected EDMC’s attempt to squash the lawsuit and ruled that the whistleblower in the case provided sufficient evidence of possible wrongdoing to allow the litigation to move forward.

No matter how it’s decided, this case shows once again why the federal government needs to develop a single, national standard that for-profit colleges would be required to use when calculating their job placement rates.

The methodologies that career colleges currently use to determine these rates vary state by state and accreditor by accreditor, making them impossible to compare. And without a single standard in place, the schools can easily game the system.

As my colleague Ben Miller reported last week, attorney generals in three states have asked the Education Department to clearly define how job placement rates should be calculated. Department officials will have that chance when they rewrite the Gainful Employment regulations. Let’s hope that they take the state attorney generals up on it.

Last week, Higher Ed Watch took a look at some of the gainful employment policy questions raised in the over 900 public comments submitted to the Department of Education. While policy discussions will ultimately be the most important considerations as the regulatory process moves forward, it's also important to remember that these issues do affect real people. So today we're looking at what some current and former students at these programs had to say in their comments.

Ambition and hope do not pan out in Wisconsin

For many low-income and non-traditional students, going to college can be a source of hope and a chance for a better life, even in spite of fears about not having succeeded academically in the past. That sense of opportunity is prevalent in a combined set of 13 comments from students who now appear to be enrolled in courses at Milwaukee Area Technical College. These comments almost all start on a hopeful note with a sense of excitement for a better life. Many detail previously unachieved academic successes in these programs--high grade point averages, scholarship-winning essays--the type of accomplishment that shows they are college-caliber material. But then the reversal--a degree with no return, a dispute over further debts, no change in status--that leaves them arguably worse off and in debt. (The original comments have been temporarily taken down from Regulations.gov with a request to remove personally identifiable information, so I created a redacted version here.) 

A story from one woman who enrolled at Sanford Brown to become a probation officer encapsulates this emotional roller coaster:

I was so excited about going to Sanford Brown College. I was sold because I was told I could get small class sizes and get extra help if I needed and graduate faster because the courses were 5 weeks long and you went to school year round until you graduated. 

...

I went ahead and took the admissions test and paid $50.00 for it. I was told by the financial aid personnel that I could also write a 500 word paper on why higher education was important and win a $1,500 scholarship. I won the scholarship because of the paper I wrote. I was so excited and proud of myself. I was looking forward to the wonderful future my 3 kids and I were going to have. I was going to finish college and finally have a career which I loved which was helping people. I was assured by all the admissions people at Sanford Brown College that I had made the right choice to attend that college. They all were so friendly and seemed to want this as much as I did.

 

Signs some schools are taking steps to improve--is it enough?

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include racial inequality, retirement, food security, and financial services.

Circle September 9 on your calendars. That's the date according to a Federal Register notice published yesterday that the Department of Education will bring together a committee to develop new regulations defining gainful employment. While it had been clear since a notice published in mid-May that the Department was going to be considering gainful employment in its next round of rulemaking, yesterday's announcement provides exact timing for negotiations, as well as the types of negotiators to be considered. 

With the first negotiating session still not for several months, it is going to be some time before the Department puts forth any public proposal, but with more than 900 public comments already submitted in response to initial thoughts on the regulatory agenda, there's already some clear indications of what we can expect to see from a policy standpoint. In a separate post I'll put up some of the more interesting comments received from students. (New America also submitted its own comments on the regulations, which can be found here.)

Arguments in favor--stronger, more comprehensive

By far the largest number of comments came similar short submissions calling for a stronger rule and protections for students and taxpayers (see here for an example). On the more substantive side, a few themes emerged:

The gainful employment rule should be stronger: Multiple comments cited the 2011 rule's "nine strikes and you're out" policy whereby a program had to fail each of three measures for three years straight as being overly generous. Several comments called for initiating penalties for programs that failed two out of the three measures. Others, such as those from The Institute for College Access and Success argued for a higher threshold on the repayment rate based upon prior studies of delinquency and default as well as how Congress set thresholds for cohort default rates. Not surprisingly, among the most thoughtful and creative comments were those from Robert Shireman, the former Department official who helped craft the initial set of regulation. Shireman's comments suggested a new structure that would draw distinctions between institutional and program eligibility depending on repayment rates, with debt to earnings tests used if repayment rates fell below a certain level.

Accountability in this space is about more than just gainful employment: Many comments touched on the idea that gainful employment is only one piece of an accountability framework that also includes cohort default rates and the 90/10 rule. Given that, many commenters stressed the need for the Department to address the use of deferments and forbearances by some institutions to keep their default rates low by limiting the number of students that could default during the measurement window. Similarly, commenters also stressed the need to consider tactics like delaying the disbursement of student aid funds so some dollars would not count as part of the 90/10 calculation for a given year.

Relief for borrowers at failing programs: The final gainful employment regulation never included any relief for borrowers that had debt from a program that eventually lost eligibility on the grounds that discharge requirements were statutory and could not be changed. This time, several comments, such as those from the National Consumer Law Center, stressed that borrowers in programs that lose eligibility should be given relief much the same way that those who attend institutions that shut down receive assistance.

Job placement matters: The comments also included several submissions from attorneys general from states such as Colorado, Illinois, and Kentucky. One issue these focused on is the importance of greater clarity in definitions of successful job placement. Inaccurate, misleading, and outright fraudulent have been an ongoing problem at some proprietary institutions for many years, but the lack of a clear definition can make enforcement of the issue more complicated (the Department's National Center for Education Statistics did hold a technical review panel on creating a definition a few years ago, but did not end up putting together a definition).

Arguments against--wait for reauthorization 

Not surprisingly, there was a pretty clear divide on whether the Department should approach the gainful employment rule again, and what to do so if it does. In general, proprietary colleges and their lobby groups argued that the Department should delay action on the grounds that Congress would be scheduled to reauthorize the Higher Education Act in short order (see page 2 of the comments from the industry's main lobby group, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities for a typical form of this argument). Since reauthorizations these days have a cicada-like periodicity  that's effectively calling for a delay of many years.

In a similar vein, several institutions also brought forward the idea that the gainful employment rule should be applied to all types of institutions, not just a subset of programs at public and private nonprofit institutions and essentially all programs at proprietary colleges. DeVry and LIM College had the clearest forms of this argument, while Strayer University took a slightly different approach, arguing why it resembles other institutions that are not subject to the gainful employment requirement and should thus be excluded. (Whether including more programs is legally allowable, a good policy idea, or just something that would be designed to get other sectors of higher education opposed is debatable.) 

By far the two most thoughtful and interesting comments from those opposed to gainful employment came from Strayer University and Champion College Services, which provides default management and would have provided gainful employment support if the rule were still in effect. Strayer's comments suggests relying on the cohort default rate to set thresholds and penalties, while Champion put forth an argument for creating a repayment rate that is based on the number of borrowers, not dollars, and define "repayment" as not being in default or more than 120 days delinquent. Other ideas more commonly raised included allowing institutions to limit the amount of debt a student can take on and risk-adjusting the measures based upon the characteristics of students enrolled. 

Not surprisingly then, we're already clearly headed for a pretty significant divide on the policy questions in gainful employment. In a subsequent post I'll pull out some of the more interesting submissions from former students and faculty at proprietary institutions. 

A federal district court judge dealt a huge blow yesterday to the U.S. Department of Education’s efforts to regulate the for-profit college sector. More broadly, the court’s decision in the case, which deals with the Department’s Gainful Employment regulations, could make it much more difficult to bring greater transparency and accountability to higher education as a whole.

The roots of this case go back to June when the federal district court vacated some of the Department of Education’s Gainful Employment (GE) regulations. While the judge affirmed the department’s authority to regulate on GE and held up requirements that GE programs disclose information like median debt to students, he found that one of the three measures used to determine whether a program prepared students for gainful employment -- the student loan repayment rate -- “lacked a reasoned basis.” And since the judge concluded that all the metrics were intertwined, he threw them all out. With no metrics to report, the disclosure requirements included in the regulations were also effectively eliminated.

The Department went back to the court and asked the judge to reinstate the reporting requirements so that it could implement the disclosure provisions of GE (without program-level information, disclosure would be impossible to achieve). In yesterday’s decision, the judge denied this request on the grounds that the reporting requirements would violate one of the worst laws in the history of higher education: the federal ban on a student unit record system.

As I wrote on Tuesday at Higher Ed Watch, the recently introduced “Students First Act” would require the U.S. Department of Education to automatically conduct program reviews of colleges that are most at risk of violating federal law. But this is only one way in which the bill, which was sponsored by Democratic Senators Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Tom Harkin of Iowa, would strengthen the tools that the Education Department employs to protect the integrity of the federal student aid programs and safeguard students from unscrupulous schools. Here are some key features that would greatly enhance the Department’s oversight and enforcement authority and provide relief to students who have been harmed.

The bill would:

• Hold School Executives Accountable for Compliance

Under the measure, college presidents, chief executive officers, and chief financial officers would personally sign the student aid program participation agreements that the Education Department enters with their schools. They then would be held liable if their schools “knowingly and willfully” violated the agreements, or engaged in “gross negligence.” In such cases, these officials would be fined an amount equal to their yearly compensation, and they would be barred from working at another college that participates in the federal financial aid programs for at least five years.

Does the U.S. Department of Education have the guts to enforce its own federal student aid program integrity rules? Judging by the Department’s record and legislation recently introduced by Senate Democrats, entitled the “Students First Act,” the answer to that question appears to be “No.”

During President Obama’s first term, administration officials went to great lengths – and spent a substantial amount of political capital – to strengthen the agency’s authority to crack down on schools that deliberately mislead students into enrolling. Yet, the Department has shied away from using these expanded powers, even when evidence of abuse has been delivered to the agency on a silver platter.

Career Education Corporation is a case in point. In the fall of 2011, the publicly-traded for-profit higher education company revealed that a significant number of its schools had been cooking the books on the job placement rates they were disclosing to prospective students. But despite this remarkable admission, the company didn’t receive even a slap on the wrist from the Department.

Welcome to the Syllabus, a weekly guide that provides insight into what’s happening in higher education.

Read:

American Council on Education Recommends 5 MOOCs for Credit, Steve Kolowich
The Chronicle of Higher Education

While there has been a lot of buzz about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) over the past few months, there has been little headway in figuring out a sustainable business model or how to award credit. The credit question just got easier to answer this past Thursday when the American Council on Education (ACE) endorsed five MOOCs. But it will still be up to individual institutions to grant the credit. So far one institution—Excelsior College—has said it will not accept them. The college’s president, John Ebersole, commented, “We would hope that ACE would support a more rigorous process as is the case with other forms of noncredit instruction.”

Now that President Obama has been reelected, and he has more time to sit back and read Higher Ed Watch, we are presenting our wish list for his second term. [And Mr. President, while you're at it, we're sure you'll enjoy our posts from last week highlighting your first term's biggest higher education hits and misses!]

Among other things, we (the authors of this post) would like to see the Obama administration do the following:

• Hold college accountable for reigning in college costs and improving student outcomes. The administration must be willing to take on the entrenched and powerful institutional interests of traditional colleges.

• Develop long-term solutions for revamping the federal financial aid programs, rather than continuing to scramble to come up with stop-gap measures to shore up funding for these programs in the heat of high-stakes budget battles.

• Finalize the financial aid shopping sheet and scorecard—and make them mandatory. Students and families need clear, consistent, useable information at key points in their decision-making process. Given that many institutions currently benefit from the lack of this information, voluntary adoption of these efforts will accomplish very little.

With the presidential election fast approaching, we are taking a closer look at President Obama’s higher education record. Yesterday, we highlighted the administration’s most significant accomplishments in this area. Today, we are examining the administration’s most significant blunders and missed opportunities.

So without further ado, here are the Obama administration’s biggest higher ed misses:

1. Fighting to Keep the 3.4% Interest Rate: Eager to woo the youth vote and tap into America’s anxiety about student debt, the Obama administration launched an all-out “don’t double my rate” PR campaign earlier this year aimed at stopping Congress from allowing the temporary 3.4 percent fixed interest rate on federally-subsidized Stafford loans to revert to 6.8 percent. Not wanting to be on the wrong side of this popular issue during an election year, Republicans and Democrats lawmakers made national headlines for their bipartisan efforts to maintain the lower rate. Largely left out of this debate, however, was any acknowledgement of how small the benefits of this fix would be: after all, it only extended the 3.4 rate for another year, only applied to a subset of new borrowers (those who qualify for subsidized Stafford loans), and only would save eligible borrowers about $9 a month. And it cost the government $6 billion. With the Pell Grant program facing a multi-billion dollar funding cliff, it’s a shame that the administration spent so much political and financial capital on a one-year gimmick that provided neither meaningful relief to financially-distressed borrowers in the short term nor to the Pell Grant program over the long haul.