Shuttered For-Profit College Was Run By Industry Perennial

[BeckyDem]

posted at 8:15 am

by David Halperin


When a for-profit college chain abruptly closes, locking out its students and leaving their futures in doubt, the industry is often quick to disavow the dead school as a wayward abuser, an outlier. In reality, though, many of the surviving for-profit college chains use the same predatory playbook as the collapsed ones, and leaders of the dead schools are often industry veterans, people who have already presided over abuses and collapses at other colleges — and may try again running a new taxpayer-funded school soon after.

Every time a for-profit college closes, students and taxpayers are left holding the bag (along with the traditional trinity of top for-profit college bankruptcy creditors: lawyers, landlords, and lead generators).

Last week’s sudden closure and bankruptcy of Texas-based Vista College, which offered programs in medical assisting, information technology, cosmetology, business, and other career fields, illustrates how for-profit college executives — mostly a group of white men presiding over schools that deceive, overcharge, and under-educate women of color and other struggling Americans — recycle themselves over and over.

Jim Tolbert is the CEO of the company behind Vista College, called Education Futures Group, which in turn has been owned by Prospect Partners, a Chicago-based private-equity firm. Prospect sports a predictable all-white-male team (with a female office manager providing diversity). Tolbert formed the college chain that became Vista with Prospect Partners in 2006. (The Prospect Partners page boasting of the company’s investment in Vista has now disappeared, although a write-up about Prospect Partners is still featured on the Education Futures Group homepage.)

https://www.republicreport.org/2021/shuttered-for-profit-college-was-run-by-industry-perennial/

[LakeArenal]

1. There have to be more penalties for this type of rip off

[BeckyDem]

2. Should be but that is not exactly how America works....it's more like this:

The Problem—Criminalization of Poverty Overview

In the United States, wealth, not culpability, often shapes outcomes. From what is defined as criminal behavior to how penalties are decided, our legal system punishes people who are poor in America far more often and more harshly than the wealthy.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/economic-justice/criminal-justice-debt-problems/

[LakeArenal]

3. Got that right.