Sunday, August 15, 2010

QUESTION: Who Owns For-Profit Diploma Mill The Art Institutes?

ANSWER: Goldman Sachs!!!

And of course they're making a ton of money from the business, even as students who attend these schools are left with tons of debt and worthless diplomas:

Carrianne Howard dreamed of designing video games, so she enrolled in a program at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, a for-profit college part-owned by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Her bachelor’s degree in game art and design cost $70,000 in tuition and fees. After she graduated in December 2007, she found a job that paid $12 an hour recruiting employees for video game companies. She lost that job a year later when her department was shuttered.

These days, Howard, 26, makes her living in a way that doesn’t require a college diploma: by stripping at the Lido Cabaret, a topless club in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she says. “I’ve got a worthless degree. It’s like I didn’t attend school at all.”

Like many investors, Goldman, owner of 38 percent of the Art Institute’s parent, Education Management Corp., was drawn to for-profit colleges by their rapid growth and soaring stock prices, reports Bloomberg Businessweek in its Aug. 9 issue. Now Goldman, which recently agreed to pay $550 million to settle U.S. civil-fraud charges related to the subprime mortgage meltdown, is invested in an industry under attack from Congress, the Obama Administration and dissatisfied students.

The Senate held a hearing Aug. 4 featuring a Government Accountability Office undercover probe that found recruiters at EDMC’s Argosy University in Chicago and 14 other for-profit colleges misled investigators posing as potential students about the cost and quality of their programs.

...

Government grants and loans to students, combined with booming enrollment, have made for-profit colleges a rewarding investment. Federal aid to for-profit colleges jumped to $26.5 billion in 2009 from $4.6 billion in 2000, according to the Education Dept. EDMC currently receives almost 82 percent of its revenue from federal financial aid programs.

...

EDMC also faces complaints from its own graduates and employees. A lawsuit filed in Texas state court by 18 students alleges they were misled about the accreditation status of their program, diminishing their degrees’ value and leaving them with debts they can’t repay. In another suit a former admissions officer claims the company engaged in high-pressure sales tactics, paying staff to sign up students. In July, dozens of faculty who tried, unsuccessfully, to form a union at one Art Institute campus complained that unqualified students were being let into their classes.

I'll tell you a quick story about the Art Institute.

I got excessed to Art and Design for one semester where I taught three sophomore classes. In one class was a very nice fellow from the support services program who read and wrote maybe at a fourth grade level. Very personable, very nice, but in need of a lot of academic assistance.

A few years after I taught at Art & Design, I saw this student, now 20, working as a security guard in a record story. He told me that he had signed up to go the Art Institute to study art but dropped out after two weeks because he couldn't keep up with the work. He owed thousands of dollars in loans just from that one semester and was trying to pay that off by working as a security guard. His mother (a single parent who lived in the projects and was herself trying to finish an associate's degree at BCC) was helping him pay the loan off but he thought he had years to go before it was done. The loan payments were close $400 a month.

It was at that point in time that I began to pay very close attention to the for-profit college industry and came to notice that almost EVERY student who attended one of these colleges left with a lot of debt and either no degree (because they were not given the academic and personal support necessary to do well in school) or with a worthless one like the woman from the Bloomberg.com story.

I have since made it my mission to give students the very devastating truths about schools like the Art Institute, Berkeley College, University of Phoenix, Laboratory Institute of Merchandising, Devry Institute, Technical Career Institute, Katherine Gibbs et. al.

Given the story above about the Art Institute and this story here about how the GAO investigated 15 for profit colleges and found fraudulent financial aid activity in ALL 15 as well as staff who gave students misleading information about costs and benefits of attending the school, I think it is very wise to warn students to steer clear of these predators.

As Senator Tom Harkin said about this industry:

"GAO's findings make it disturbingly clear that abuses in for-profit recruiting are not limited to a few rogue recruiters or even a few schools with lax oversight. To the contrary, the evidence points to a problem that is systemic to the for-profit industry," the Democratic chairman said.

Indeed. And when you see that corporations like Goldman Sachs have a 38% stake in for-profit schools like the Art Institute, you can see why the evidence points to systemic abuse and crime in the for-profit industry.



11 comments:

  1. This is good biz for Goldman Suchs because the American consumer is tapped out. They ain't spending any more. So the next best thing is to get guaranteed funds directly from Uncle Sam or city municipalities. Ergo , charter school biz is relatively lucrative since private consumer spending is next to zero.

    If you want to get even more nauseous, read the Matt Taibbi's most recent article in Rolling Stone on the sham of "financial reform."

    Dumbama, the human teleprompter, is as corrupt as the day is long-TOTALLY in bed with the likes of Goldman Suchs and other criminal syndicates.

    This link should give you the entire RS article.

    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/188551?RS_show_page=0

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  2. Things are even worse than you report.

    The other major investor in the Art Institutes is Leeds Equity, run by Jeffrey Leeds, who is the head of the Green Dot school here in NYC. Green Dot is the privatizer that cut a deal with Randi Weingarten to open a school here, a school where the UFT gets dues money but the teachers have no tenure or seniority protections. Green Dot has been active for years cannibalizing public schools in LA, where it started.

    On the more positive side, even Wall Street sharks have their doubts about the private, for-profit "universities." Hedge fund manager David Einhorn, who predicted and made a fortune from the demise of Bear Stearns and Lehman, has been going around saying that the for-profits are toast. Let's hope he's right.

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  3. Thanks for the info on Art Institutes and Greed Dot, Michael.

    Anon, the Taibbi article is VERY good, though as you say, it makes you sick reading it - the same people who nearly brought down the system back in 2008 are STILL running things.

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  4. So, you'made it your mission' to 'give students the 'devastating truth' about these schools? You are a pompous, pretentious ass, who does not know anyhing about these schools or this industry. You are ignorant and devoid of real facts, real inofrmation. You deal with implication and innuendo, half truths and falsehoods. You are a self-appointed judge and jury - and you fail at both. I will make it MY mission to expose you for the sham that you are.

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    1. Sounds like you work for one of these places. I used to as well. It's amazing how defensive you guys get when you expose the dirty truths about these schools. All of the investigations, lawsuits, and victims don't lie. Of course the employees of these places will defend them tooth and nail until they are fired when shit hits the fan and these for profits start going out of business.

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  5. Well, Mr. Hammond, considering the number of consumer complaints made against Devry University at consumeraffairs.com (I count 7 pages of complaints) or other complaint boards on the Internet and considering that a class action lawsuit was filed against Devry by former students who alleged that Devry engaged in "widespread deception, unlawful business practices and false advertising and alleging that students were not being prepared for high tech jobs," a lawsuit which Devry settled, and considering that Devry settled ANOTHER legal case filed by the state of NY after NY accused Devry of "questionable loan practices," I think YOU do NOT have a leg to stand on.

    If you believe I am engaging in implication and innuendo, please provide the facts for those. I will HAPPILY do a series of posts about Devry using the public records available (i.e., lawsuits filed by students, legal actions taken by states, investigations done by the Federal Department of Education) as well as all of the complaints made by either current or former students at Devry or prospective students who asked for information from Devry, then couldn't get your sales department to stop harassing them with hard sell tactics.

    Given the volume of negative information available about Devry from just a simple Google search, I have plenty of stuff to chose from. Here is a taste from Consumbercomplaints.com:

    Abdullah of New York, NY March 21, 2009

    Abdullah of New York NY (03/21/09)
    Devry took out student loan under my name and did not apply to any of the classes that I took. I pay all my classes in cash.But Devry took out 6000.00 loan from Wachovia and keeps it in their account.Now I owe Wachovia 6000.00.

    Damages 1) The liability in the credit report unnecessarily goes up by 6,000. Negatively impacting my credit. 2) Mental frustration caused, due to continuasly writng emails and several meeting, to resolve this issue without any solutions.

    Paula of Arlington, MA August 7, 2009

    I requested information online about 3 months ago. DeVry started calling me 8-10 times a day. Sometimes only 20 minutes apart between calls. Never leaving a message.

    I have contacted them on multiple ocassions asking to not be called again. I continue to receive calls. I believe it is boarding on harassing and I would like the calls to stop.

    Matthew of Katy, TX December 6, 2008

    Matthew of Katy TX (12/06/08)
    I have been attending DeVry University for just a little over 2 years now, and I have never had such a terrible experience in my life. I think that attending the prison that is the Texas public school system was by far more bearable. It's not that I couldn't cut it nor has been an issue of handing me an education because I have worked my butt off to be on the Dean's list for every semester (7) that I have attended.

    My disappointment stems from the lack of educated instructors at my local campus. It seems as though DeVry hires mostly incompetent morons to instruct such complicated courses as programming and databasing. A student should never be told to go to the internet to find an answer when we're paying such a high price for tuition as it is.

    The lies have been laid on thick by the administration and all of the faculty is in on the dirty deed because they know and condone such corruption to go on.

    When I registered for the '08 fall semester I was told that I had less credits than what I left with the last semester and financial aid does not recognize their own records as to how many credits I have received.

    I came to DeVry for an education, not to go broke with no future.

    I am now in debt up to my ears and may get a degree in nothing because apparently employers I have been conversing with are not interested in a DeVry degree. I am paying more now than ever before for what? We are forced to do gobs of work that we were never properly instructed to do. I feel like my money is more important than my education to these jokers.

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  6. Wow, RBE, you really seem to have struck a nerve with Mr. Hammond: is it possible that his venom is due to the possibility that he has an unspoken economic interest in this debate?

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  7. I bet it does, Michael. And given the information that was released by the DOE this weekend about student repayment rates at for-profit colleges and given the Harkin push to look VERY CLOSELY at the business models of these "schools," it seems people with an economic interest in for-profit schools might be losing lots of money very soon.

    Here is the Harkin info:

    http://harkin.senate.gov/press/release.cfm?i=326983

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  8. A number of these schools also have taken state money given to students with IEP's. Those students, through VESID, were given scholarship money to attend these schools. I heard DeVry and Lincoln Tech mentioned often by kids planning to go this route. These schools mentioned, and others in this questionable category took these monies to train kids in auto repair, computer technology and repair, or to be electricians, welders, or plumbers. Years ago I thought these schools were fraudulent or one step away from that status. It's a shame that the abovementioned students couldn't go to a community college and continue from that point. It's obvious that they wanted an education, but what they got was snake oil.

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  9. I just cannot believe that the DOE lets Devry get away with what they do. The admissions advisors get prizes, extra money, gift certificates, for getting applicatons to the school. WHY has nobody figured this out yet? Pay $700 or $4000 for your first year of school? These people are PAID SALESPEOPLE that "advise" the students. It's a for profit industry. DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. It's sick.

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  10. It is sad that the enrollment standards are so lax. This has caused confusion, job and financial pain. Once college was to broadening your education so that you would become a better citizen, and in the case of my concern, an effective American. It was not locked into finding a job and the disillusionment inherent in this single-minded pursuit of education = cash. Of course the prices should nowhere be as high as they have become. Traditionally banks charger greater interest for the most risky borrowers. It is with risky students that prices skyrocket. There needs to be a debate about education that finds it basis in LABOR versus WORK. I am in the arts and have found that if one loves one's work (LABOR), then good money will follow IF one is sensitive to the shift in the market and plans carefully one's strategic course. People need to have time to percolate ideas and find one' way into the work world. By being pressured into a contract and then buying it, that is the problem, once one is honest with ones self then education is a great pursuit by any standard.

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