One of Corinthian Colleges' for-profit campuses.
The drawn-out collapse of Corinthian Colleges was completed Sunday with the company's announcement that 28 of its campuses would be immediately shuttered. This was
greeted with satisfaction in some quarters:
“Finally, we see the end of this rotten company, but there are still thousands of students who may never see the end of the damage Corinthian has caused if the Department of Education doesn’t move quickly to provide some relief,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said.
In 2014, the government ordered Corinthian to sell or close its campuses after discovering it had falsified grades, attendance and job-placement rates. But the U.S. Department of Education has now
followed up the closure with an "official guidance" suggesting that the 16,000 students left in the lurch by Corinthian should transfer to other private schools. Just one problem: The department's list for choices includes several that have their own financial troubles:
Among the schools on the Education Department’s list of “viable transfer options” released to Corinthian students are ITT Technical Institute, which is facing a predatory lending lawsuit by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and investigations by 17 state attorneys general, and schools owned by EDMC, which is being investigated by the Department of Justice. Teetering on the edge of financial instability, EDMC has instituted mass layoffs and sold off several of its Art Institutes campuses.
“Has the Department of Education learned nothing?” said Dick Durbin [...] in a speech to Congress today. “How in good faith can they tell these Corinthian students—who just had their college disappear and are sitting on a pile of debt—that these are viable transfer options for their students?”
How, indeed.
Three years ago, Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, now retired from the Senate, released a scathing 249-page report based on a two-year study of 30 for-profit colleges. Those schools cost the taxpayers $32 billion, the report said, even though most of their students leave school without a degree, half of them within four months:
“In this report, you will find overwhelming documentation of exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes, taxpayer dollars spent on marketing and pocketed as profit, and regulatory evasion and manipulation,” Mr. Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a statement on Sunday. “These practices are not the exception—they are the norm. They are systemic throughout the industry, with very few individual exceptions.”
Telling those out-of-luck Corinthian students to transfer to another for-profit operation that's under scrutiny for the same misbehavior constitutes more than mere malpractice. It's pure idiocy.