Oof. I couldn't force myself to read much past this:
"You'd probe to find a weakness," said Brian Klein, a former admissions employee who worked for three years at Argosy University Online, one of four major colleges operated by EDMC. "You basically take all that failure and all those bad decisions, and you spin it around and put it right back in their face as guilt, to go to this ****ty university and run up all of this debt."
Yeah, it's definitely a big lengthy... here are some highlights I found particularly disturbing:
"The so-called 50 percent rule, which required half of all students to be at a ground campus in order for a school to be eligible for federal aid, had been put in place to discourage dubious distance education programs that offered subpar learning. Boehner helped to nix the rule in a budget agreement that took effect in early 2006, allowing schools to expand enrollments -- and revenues -- without having to invest in additional ground campuses."
"The company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission at the time laid out some of the attractive aspects of investing in higher education: 'Given the advanced payment of tuition and fees which is customary for the post-secondary education industry, our working capital is on average a source of cash,' the filings argued. The expansion of online programs also offered 'an attractive avenue for growth that utilizes many of our existing education curricula while requiring less capital expenditures relative to campus-based expansion.'" (Goldman Sachs is one of the three private equity firms to buy their stocks up, by the way)
It then goes into how Todd S. Nelson, the former president of the University of Phoenix company(their big rival), started running Ed. Management Corp. Under his management, UoPhoenix had to pay a $9.8 million settlement with the government for predatory practices.
"Employees who had worked at the company prior to Nelson's arrival noticed a distinct shift once he came on board.
'It was an absolute feeding frenzy,' said Kathie Bittel, who worked as a recruiter at Argosy University the first year after the company went private under Goldman, when Nelson came on board. 'They were on us every minute of the day. We had managers and directors who were just literally circling the pods, listening to every word that was spoken. I swear I thought they were going to wear out the carpeting.'"
"A current admissions employee at South University online, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, recalled a single mother who was worried about taking out student loans, since she was barely able to pay her utility bills. He figured she wasn't prepared for classes, but his manager told him to turn the situation around on the recruit, asking if she always wanted to be struggling to make ends meet, and implying that a college degree could change things.
All admissions employees interviewed by The Huffington Post described the widely used method of "finding the pain" in prospective students, a tactic employees said was meant to exploit recruits' past failures in careers or education.
A sales call handout obtained by The Huffington Post describes the first three steps when talking to a new sales lead: '1. Build em up! ... 2. Break Em Down! Find the PAIN! ... 3. Build em Up!'"
"The scales are so tipped; these people have no way of possibly making a good decision," Lawrence said. "It was like we were used car salesmen. We would basically psychologically manipulate people into doing this. My master's was in clinical psychology, and it was like I was using my powers for evil."
Even recruiters' job titles were intended to be misleading, employees said. An entry-level admissions employee was known as an "assistant director of admissions," a title that lent authority to someone trying to close a sales deal.
"Remember, they don't know you're in a call center," said Klein, the former Argosy admissions adviser. "They think you're at a college, up in an ivory tower, sitting back in a tweed vest with a pipe."
"They're wolves; they're hunters," said the current employee. "They have one objective: They're there to make money and get students."
How the recruiters get paid:
An updated copy of the matrix from 2010, which was developed after Nelson arrived and provided to The Huffington Post, shows a chart with the number of students on the left side, and corresponding salary ranges to the right, based on "quality factors" ranging from "unsatisfactory" to "outstanding." The vast majority of the salary increases come from student enrollment numbers.
For example, a recruiter who enrolled a low number of students could only make up to $35,000, even with an "outstanding" quality rating. Yet someone who enrolled the highest range of students but received an "unsatisfactory" quality rating could receive a $73,000 salary; an "outstanding" rating would net the same employee a salary above $114,000.
About their current lawsuit:
"We will not train or coach our staff to 'dig for the pain' or to manipulate the student's previous misfortune," the document reads. "Instead of dwelling on a past that the student can't change, we train our admissions representatives to facilitate a conversation that considers the Consequence of moving forward without the education."
Instead of "overcoming objections," the new term is "resolving student concerns"; instead of making a "close" on a sales call, a recruiter is now "gaining commitment."
The Justice Department lawsuit could have grave consequences for the future of EDMC. The false claims suit argues that because EDMC violated the recruiter compensation ban, the company unlawfully took funds from the federal government.
False claims suits can technically recover three times the amount of fraudulent claims made to the government. The complaint notes that EDMC has claimed $11 billion in federal money since 2003, meaning that if all $11 billion were found to be fraudulently claimed, the government could recover up to $33 billion, plus additional penalties of up to $11,000 for each government claim, according to the Justice Department.
And... their reaction: "This notion that somehow private equity folks acquired the company and changed the culture and turned it into a boiler-room mentality is just nonsense," Leeds said. "We're people who take this stuff really seriously. We have two former secretaries of education on my board of advisers. Do you think they would be associated with people who would ever think about or be capable of creating a boiler room? It's nuts."
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"The Company's focus has always been on student success, including under Mr. Nelson's leadership," a spokeswoman said in a prepared statement. "Certainly, the Company does not condone unethical recruitment practices. If any such activity were brought to our attention of our organization, immediate corrective action (up to and including termination of violating employee) would be taken, as per our Code of Business Ethics and Conduct."
......
Sorry, this is still a lot of info, but I thought it gives more context into just how problematic the for-profit school system is... we can argue it as much as we want. The facts are clear that they care ONLY about money. Even if the brick and mortar schools had some redeeming qualities, one can only assume that as they continue to focus on the more profitable online alternatives, those places will diminish in quality even more. The author of this article guesses that they will settle this lawsuit out of court, since more claims of this nature never amount to much, so I think the real risk to the company is pretty low. It's really just sickening... they have the perfect scheme here... get students to take all the risk, since the federal loan money goes directly to the school, and then let the student take the fall for it when they can't get a job to pay for them! UGH! I think it's been stated before, but the rates of students at these school who default on their loans is increasing... Truly horrific!
I mean to be frank, that's what the internet is synonymous to - a bunch of idiots arguing over whose right versus whose wrong and why. 
