Mass. Attorney General Martha Coakley filed a lawsuit Wednesday against a Brockton-based for-profit school, alleging the institution falsified alumni statistics to entice new students.
“We allege Sullivan and Cogliano deceived students by promising careers in the medical field with misleading ads and inflated placement rates,” Coakley said in a press release Wednesday.
Sullivan and Cogliano, a university training center with locations in Massachusetts and Florida, stated that between 70 and 100 percent of their graduates went on to work in the medical field, according to the press release. In reality, less than 25 percent of the graduates went on to work in the medical field.
“We are conducting an extensive investigation into the for-profit school industry. For-profit schools are extremely expensive and heavily funded through federal student loans, so all taxpayers have a stake in this. If students do not receive these promised jobs and wind up in default, the students and taxpayers suffer,” Coakley said in the release.
Sullivan and Cogliano, like many for-profit schools, has access to federal funding. When Sullivan and Cogliano gained access to funding its revenue quintupled from $1.9 million to more than $10 million, but their academics suffered, according to the press release.
According to a two-year investigation into for-profit colleges by U.S. Senator Thomas Harkin of Iowa, “Federal taxpayers are investing billions of dollars a year, $32 billion in the recent year, in companies that operate for-profit colleges.”
Harkin’s report, released in the summer of 2012, further accused for-profit colleges of focusing on financial returns because shareholders want higher profits. This financial incentive, the report suggests, resulted in poor education.
Nationwide, there are also 19 law schools being sued for lying about the success of their graduates.
Jesse Strauss of Strauss Law P.L.L.C. in New York is handling most of the cases against the law schools.
“The law schools are being sued by the alumni/graduates from recent years because the laws schools made their employment data appear that there would be a very good chance at being employed after graduating from law school,” he said. “They are suing because they feel that they were misled.”
Most of the law schools have changed the way the put out their figures and how they operate because of the lawsuits that have been brought forward, he said.
“The law school litigation has been a tremendous success,” Strauss said. “The law schools have changed the way that they operate. Many no longer put out the misleading data that they put out before, and there has been a market correction because of that. Law school applications are at a 30-year low according to my understanding.”
Richa Kaul, a College of Arts and Sciences freshman, said statistics played a big role in her coming to Boston University.
“If BU was lying about the success of its students, I would be very upset,” she said. “I would question their right to institute any sort of honor code without following it themselves. I have too much trust in BU to think they would do something like that though.”
Ashley Thompson, a junior in the College of Communications said if BU were to fabricate its statistics it would be a major embarrassment.
“It makes the school look really terrible, it makes your institution look bad because they are just flat-out lying first of all, and it diminishes the value of the university in a way,” she said. “It diminishes the name, when someone thinks Boston University, they think that it is a good school based on its reputation, but if it were to do something like this it would really hurt the school’s name.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
Mr. Strauss’ comments are extremely deceptive about the results of the law school litigation. Of the cases which have reached a final judgment, he has lost six of those cases, and so far has not won any. Sure, law schools have changed their way of doing business, but that was as a result of changes on the ABA rules and Congressional pressure, and the work of an organization called Law School Transparency. The change was industry-wide, and had nothing to do with whether a school had been sued or not, and those forces were in the works before any school was sued.
The sun rose this morning. It must be because Mr. Strauss filed a lawsuit.
There is a for profit college in my community, and I feel strongly that they are taking advantage of friends of mine. I recognize very similar behavior in advertising and misleading as was described in the above article. Who, or what agency, could I contact to get a legitimate opinion?
entusiasmado; no dudes que seguiré tu blog