While Education Management offers students at closing schools a chance to finish, ITT said its campuses remain open. The company disputes the CFPB and SEC allegations. Career Education didn’t respond to messages about loan discharges.
Borrowers on many closing campuses could successfully argue that their loans should be canceled, too, according to David Bergeron, former chief adviser to Duncan on higher education, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank.
Two students at Career Education’s Sanford-Brown Institute, which offered training for health-care jobs, are making just such a case, according to Eileen Connor, a senior staff attorney with the New York Legal Assistance Group. The company didn’t respond to questions about the students’ complaints.
“Functionally, the school is closed,” said Connor, who filed requests for discharges for the students, whom she declined to identify. “Support staff and instructors have quit, students can’t complete their internships, and the school won’t exist to provide placement assistance.”
When Roderiques started at New England Institute of Art in 2012, more than 1,000 students occupied two classroom buildings on its campus in Brookline, Massachusetts, sharing space with offices of the renowned Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Students Vent
On a recent afternoon, students breaking from classes gathered in an outdoor courtyard, venting about the school’s closing. Roderiques, who works at an Apple store and makes wedding videos, said he’s borrowed enough to buy “a small house” for his degree in video and film production. If he doesn’t get relief, payments will be $1,000 a month.
In May, he started a petition, now signed by 500 students, asking the government for loan forgiveness. Chris Hardman, a spokesman for Education Management, sometimes referred to as EDMC, said the company works with students to understand their loan obligations.
“EDMC and the Art Institutes have ruined the lives of many kids,” Roderiques’s petition reads. “We deserve the opportunities we were promised.”