Senator Durbin targets for-profit schools
Challenging the 90-10 rule, which bans for-profit colleges and universities from obtaining more than 90 percent of their revenue from the Department of Education’s federal student aid program, Durbin proposed to change the rule to 85-15.
The new Post 9/11 GI Bill gives educational benefits up to 36 months to those who qualify. Veterans serving after Sept. 10, 2001, for at least 90 days will receive 40 percent of their tuition paid by the VA; those who serve for up to 36 months are able to obtain 100 percent of their tuition costs.
Durbin spoke before a panel of experts and military veterans who obtained loans to attend for-profit colleges and are now struggling to pay back their debt.
Veteran Bernetta Garrett, who served eight years in the military, said she has more than $100,000 in college debt. Garrett, who has two daughters and is a single mother, testified that she thought by getting her two degrees she would be able to give her daughters “a better life.”
Garrett said she has debated whether to pay the $800 a month due for her loans or maintain a roof over her family’s head and food on the table. She ended her testimony by saying she hopes future veterans “will not have to struggle as much as I have.”
But others have publicly defended for-profit colleges. Penny Lee, managing director of the Coalition for Educational Success, a for-profit industry trade group, spoke recently to the Huffington Post. She pointed to the favorable statistics on graduation rates for short-term degree programs. Several studies have shown that students who attend for-profits are more likely to complete work to earn an associate’s degree or professional certificate than those who are working toward a four-year degree.
Lee also cited a recent Government Accountability Office report that found for-profit students had similar earnings to students from other sectors of higher education.
“Particularly in these difficult economic times, we believe all institutions of higher education, regardless of a school’s tax status, should be focused on offering students an education that makes them ‘job ready’ and puts them on the pathway toward a career,” Lee said in a statement.
Sergeant Chris Pantzke, victim of PTSD and a serious brain injury while in Iraq, said he was a target of aggressive marketing from a for-profit college when he decided to go to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Pantzke testified that he fell for the “sales pitch” by the for-profit school, but by then it was too late to do anything about it.
“I already had taken out the loans, which was roughly $26,000,” said Pantze. During his time at the for-profit college, he had difficulty receiving the assistance he needed with his classes. He was unable to get his degree and dropped out. He has since been unable to find a job in photography, which is what he studied at the Art Institute.
A Senate committee report noted that between 2006 and 2010, roughly 20 for-profit colleges saw their education benefits from the Veteran’s Administration and the Department of Defense increase by 683 percent, that’s more than $500 million.
Stifel Nicolaus, an investment bank, recently published an analysis about the University of Phoenix, America’s largest private university and the largest military-student and veteran market of for-profit colleges. The report said federal grants and loans account for about 88 percent of the university’s revenue.
Durbin said for-profit colleges received $29 billion from the federal government from 2005 to 2009 to pay for veterans’ tuition.
His proposed legislation is being co-sponsored by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).
Durbin closed his testimony by stating students and veterans are “signing up for a lifetime of debt.”
Small business owners want to focus on operation, not legal disputes. Most successful businesses function with the support of employees and staff. All business owners know that staff that are content at work are more productive for the business overall. However, most businesse do not have a Human Resources Department to handle employee related issues. What happens when there is a problem with an employee?
Unfortunately, the answer to that question is often associated with high legal fees in a narrow legal market. There are other options, however. A company can take several important steps to prevent any disputes from arising in the first place:
- Have an employment manual available for each employee and a signed acknowledgement form from the employee accepting responsibility for its rules and procedures;
- Create a progressive disciplinary policy to place employees on notice of any problems you have with their work performance; and
- Document any issues immediately when the arise and sign and date the documentation.
Our law firm specializes in providing the tools to small businesses that give them the resources of a Human Resources Department, without the added cost. Our fees are tailored specifically to your needs, rather than a high, hourly rate without any idea what the final bill will be.
In today’s job market, employees are fighting harder than ever before to keep their jobs. The Associated Press recently announced that federal job discrimination complaints are at an all-time high. In 2011, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received nearly 100,000 charges of discrimination. These charges range from discrimination to retaliation based upon sex, race, age, disability, national origin, and religion. Be sure you have an attorney on your side to defend against any employee dispute.
The Texas Workforce Commission Career Schools and Colleges rules require that a school must report program completion, job placement, and employment data each
year for each program approved by TWC. The career schools are required to show that a minimum number of students are being employed in their field upon graduation. If the program cannot meet the minimum requirements the program’s approval is revoked.
Recentlly, the Texas Workforce Commission concluded an investigation of American Commercial College. American Commercial College has campuses throughout Texas includining Lubbock, Aibilene, Odessa, and San Angelo. The TWC investigation concluded that ACC’s reported employment rates were highly unreliable and significantly misreported. TWC found that many of the graduates that were reported as employed were not employed as reported. When these graduates were removed from the totals the Abilene and Lubbock campuses failed to meet the minimum employment rate for past three consecutive years, which requires the revocation of certificates of approval. Additionally the TWC found that many students that were employed were reported twice in different years. Employees also admitted that they falsified employment information on the reports submitted to the TWC
at the direction of ACC management.
Under Texas Education Code §132.065 career schools or colleges that are eligible to receive federal student loans under Title IV, Higher Education Act of 1965 (USC §1070 et seq.) are required to verify each student’s enrollment in the program by documenting the student’s participation in an academically related activity (ARA) of the program at four different times
during a semester. The TWC investigation found that ACC forged student signatures on ARA forms.
Unfortunately many career schools and colleges do not follow these requirements. This latest action by the TWC is aimed at protecting students. If you believe that your career school or college is not following requirements you need an advocate. Contact an attorney that is well-versed in consumer fraud. Julie Johnson has devoted her career to fighting these kinds of practices, and she will put her expertise to work for you.
This is a great article about the huge number of complaints the Texas Department of Insurance received about Farmers Insurance.
Farmers Insurance leads in consumer claim complaints
Published 11:11 p.m., Friday, November 4, 2011
- / HC
- Farmers Insurance has received more complaints about its handling of homeowner claims than any other insurer in Texas, state records compiled by a watchdog group show.
Farmers, whose various Texas units combine to make it the state’s third-largest insurer, received 207 complaints from Oct. 1, 2010, to Sept. 30, 2011, according to Austin-based Texas Watch, which obtained complaint data from state regulators.
-
For the full text of the article click on the link below.
http://www.chron.com/business/article/Farmers-Insurance-leads-in-consumer-claim-2253193.php
OSHA
fines Exxon refinery.
Reuters (9/14) reports that the US
Occupational Safety and Health Administration said Exxon Mobil’s
502,000-barrels-per-day refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana exposed workers to
potential fires, explosions, and other safety hazards. Exxon spokeswoman
Rachael Moore said in a statement that the company believes it is complying
with all applicable laws and regulations. The company now faces $126,000 in
fines for 20 serious safety violations found in a March 14 inspection.
I thought this blog post was on point I wanted to repost it here.
Tricks of the Trade School: A Guide to Manipulating Job Placement Rates
- Author(s):
- Stephen Burd
As we recently reported, there is growing evidence to suggest that some of the country’s largest for-profit higher education companies have deliberately misled prospective students and regulators about their record in placing graduates into jobs. But just how do they go about manipulating their job placement rates?
A False Claims lawsuit that is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida against Kaplan Higher Education provides some clues. In the lawsuit, Victoria Gatsiopoulos, a former senior career advisor at Kaplan Career Institute’s ICM campus in Pittsburgh, accused the company of cooking the books on the school’s job placement rates to ensure that the campus remained eligible to participate in the federal student aid programs.
Kaplan officials deny the charges. But at Higher Ed Watch, we find the allegations compelling because they are consistent with accusations that Kathleen Bittel, a career service advisor at Education Management Corporation’s Art Institute of Pittsburgh, made about EDMC in testimony she delivered at a U.S. Senate hearing last September.[EDMC denies the accusations from Bittel, who has since left the company.]
Together, the Kaplan lawsuit and Bittel’s testimony provide a revealing look at some of the tricks of the trade that for-profit colleges use to inflate their job placement numbers. According to the former career service advisors, schools often:
- Count Any and Every Job as a Successful Placement
In calculating their job placement rates, for-profit schools are supposed to include only those graduates who find work in their field of study or related fields. But Bittel and Gatsiopoulos say that for-profit colleges often consider any and every job their graduates obtain as a successful placement.
According to the lawsuit against Kaplan, the company counted the following ICM graduates as being successfully placed:
- An accounting management student who got a job stocking shelves and running the cash register at Walmart
- A business administrative student who secured employment working the phones for the telemarketing firm Dial America
- A criminal justice student who worked as a crew leader at McDonald’s
In her testimony, Bittel said that she and her fellow career advisors at EDMC were “repeatedly pressured to call graduates working in unrelated fields and review with them the courses they had taken while at the Art Institute to find obscure details of their current jobs where it could be considered that they were indeed ‘using their skills.’”
“If one could convince them that they were using these ‘skills’ at least 25 percent of the time in their current job, and to sign the employment form stating so, then their job could be counted as field related employment,” she stated. “This was rife with abuse. Employees were expected to convince graduates that skills they used in jobs such as working as waiters, payroll clerks, retail sales, and gas station attendants were actually related to their course of study in areas like graphic design and residential planning.”
- Count Students Who Work for as Little as a Day
When calculating their employment rates, some for-profit college companies include graduates who are employed for extremely short periods of time.
According to Bittel:
There was no company policy [at EDMC] stating that a graduate had to be currently employed in order for their job to be counted among the statistics. If they had worked in their field for one day within the time period between graduation and the six month deadline, it was routinely included in the statistics as gainful employment.[emphasis added]
Similarly, the Kaplan lawsuit cites records that the career institute provided the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS) that show that the company considered the following ICM graduates to be successfully placed:
- A security/investigative agent who worked from March 13 to 14, 2006
- A medical assistant who worked a one-day assignment on July 14, 2006
- A receptionist who worked from May 5 through 20, 2006
- An insurance representative who worked from August 7 through 28, 2006
- Count Students Who Work at Same Job They Had Before Enrolling
For-profit colleges often take credit for jobs their graduates had before they enrolled. According to the lawsuit, Kaplan considered the following ICM graduates to be successfully placed:
- A residential program worker who graduated on August 16, 2005, but had held the same job since May 15, 2001
- A parking enforcement officer who graduated on May 3, 2006, but had held the same job since August 14, 2000.
- Exclude Certain Students from the Pool of Graduates Counted
The former career advisors say that for-profit schools also inflate their job placement rates by excluding certain graduates from their calculations. To do so, the schools must get the graduates to sign waivers saying that they have experienced “extenuating circumstances” that prevent them from seeking employment.
In her testimony, Bittel said that EDMC officials routinely exclude graduates if they meet the following conditions:
- Military – active duty military or the spouse of a soldier
- Medical Condition – primary care-giver or suffering from a medical condition or disability preventing them from working.
- Established Professional – someone who had worked in an unrelated field for at least 6 months earning a minimum of 10 percent more than the average starting salary in their degree program
- Stay at Home Parent – one not seeking employment, choosing to raise their children instead
- Education – one who was continuing their education and choosing not to seek employment at that time
While some of these exclusions are entirely legitimate, others can be easily gamed (as we will see in the next section). Bittel particularly objects to excluding “established professionals” because, in many cases, the schools have failed to deliver on their promises.
“The established professional, by signing this form, was essentially acknowledging that they could not leave their current employment due to the ‘financial hardship’ it would cause them, because a job in their degree field would pay them far less than what they were already earning in the field they had hoped to leave by obtaining the education,” Bittel stated.
- Fabricate and Falsify Records
As we have previously reported, some companies have been accused of completely fabricating job placement records and forging graduates’ signatures on them. The allegations that Bittel and Gatsiopoulos have made don’t rise to that level but are serious nonetheless.
In her testimony, Bittel said that when graduates report earnings that are too low to be considered a successful placement, career service advisers at EDMC have often deleted the records and created new ones using average salary data they obtain from the website Salary.com for the relevant occupation. EDMC officials have repeatedly denied these allegations.
According to the lawsuit against Kaplan, company officials require employees to get students “to sign fraudulent waivers attesting that they are continuing their education.” Unlike EDMC, Kaplan counts graduates who continue their studies to be successfully placed, the lawsuit states. To pump up their numbers, “Defendants required their employees, including Relator Gatsiopoulos, to have students sign waivers even when they had no plans of continuing their education,” the complaint says.
Conclusion
The allegations included in these cases should provide a useful road map for the Department of Education officials and state attorney generals who are investigating the industry. Because ultimately it will be up to these federal and state regulators to determine just how widespread these practices are and how much damage they have caused.
U.S. joins suit to recover funds from Education Management Corporation
August 08, 2011|By Terry Frieden, CNN Justice Producer
The Justice Department joined a whistle-blower and several state governments Monday in filing suit against a for-profit educational firm that has received more than $11 billion in federal student aid.
The government joined the suit against Education Management Corp. (EDMC), which has enrolled thousands of students in dozens of educational programs across the U.S. The government alleges the company paid admissions recruiters bonuses tied to the number of students they recruited, in violation of federal law.
Assistant Attorney General Tony West at the Justice Department said the company had misused federal educations funds by paying improper incentives to admissions recruiters. “We will protect both students and taxpayers from arrangements that emphasized profits over education,” West said.
Many of the educational programs or “colleges” carried the name of The Art Institute of the city or state in which it was located. Several other schools carried the name Argosy University.
For the full link to the story. http://articles.cnn.com/2011-08-08/justice/schools.recruiting.suit_1_federal-student-aid-recruiters-federal-court?_s=PM:CRIME
Our office represents several students in claims against Argosy at their Dallas campus. If you have any information regarding that campus please contact us.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/education/09forprofit.html
How do I deal with the Insurance Adjuster?
I once took the deposition of an insurance executive who became quite upset at my questions about why my
client’s claim was not paid promptly. Ultimately, the angry insurance executive blurted out the essence of the
problem, “Insurance companies are not in business to pay out claims!” Not every insurance representative is out to
cheat you, but they all have one thing in common, they are paid by the insurance company, not by you. This
economic reality explains why it is sometimes so difficult to deal with adjusters after an accident or other claim is made.
Many people who are in accidents attempt to deal directly with the responsible party’s insurer or with their own
insurance company. Obviously, it is the motivation of the responsible party’s insurance company to pay you as little as
possible to make the problem go away. If you cannot reach an agreement on the amount or terms of the settlement then you
have some options.
A. File a suit in small claims court. Small claims court cases make sense if your damages involve small amounts. These cases can be a faster, less expensive, and less stressful way to resolve differences. You don’t necessarily need an
attorney to represent you in such courts. Small claims courts have a maximum amount for which you can sue
depending on state law.
B. You can contact your state’s department of insurance and file a complaint. It is unlikely that the agency will take action on your behalf, but you may spur a company to do the right thing and increase the settlement offer. Your state agency may investigate if the insurance company acted improperly or refused to negotiate a settlement.
C. You can file a lawsuit against the party responsible for the accident. You may be better off consulting an attorney if the time limit for filing suit is coming up, the damages are severe, there are competing legal issues at play, or if you simply do not have a personality type that is comfortable dealing with the situation.
If you are dealing with your own insurance company and have not been able to come to an agreement the situation is bit little different. The policy you signed up for is a specialized contract. You agreed to send in your premiums and the insurance company agreed to provide coverage.
As part of most insurance agreements there is an arbitration provision. Arbitration provisions in insurance policies are sometimes called appraisal clauses. Either the insured or the insurer can invoke the appraisal clause when an agreement can’t be reached. Generally, both the insured and the insurance company get an appraiser to review the claim and they determine a settlement figure. If the appraisers can’t agree another appraiser is asked in to look at the situation. Typically, a decision by two of the three appraisers is considered binding. The arbitration process can take weeks to months. Arbitration is not free. Both parties must pay for appraisers and share in the cost of the third appraiser if needed. These costs may be more than what you’re hoping to get.
Another form of dispute resolution is mediation and is often confused with arbitration. Mediation is when a mediator meets with the parties and tries to help the parties resolve the dispute. Mediation is generally not binding. Another factor, to take into account is that insurance representatives deal with these issues on a daily basis; the typical person seeking payment does not. It is generally a good idea to seek the opinion of an experienced attorney when dealing with insurance issues.
The Law Office of Julie Johnson, PLLC is dedicated to the protection of client rights. This blog is not intended to be specific legal advice; rather each situation must be reviewed to determine the rights and duties that may be presented by each unique set of circumstances. If you believe you have been injured through the negligence of others please fell free to contact us through our website, www.juliejohnsonlaw.com.
The New York Attorney General is investigating colleges run by Corinthian Colleges
According to Reuters, New York is the latest state to start probing for-profit schools that have come under the scanner for over-charging students and burdening them with debt.
The Obama government has threatened to cut off federal aid — a big chunk of revenue for these colleges — if the for-profit schools continue to show high student debt levels.
Involvement of state administrations started in October when Florida said it was probing Apollo Group, Corinthian, Washington Post’s Kaplan colleges and Career Education for alleged unfair and deceptive enrollment practices. For more information follow on the link http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/20/us-education-idUSTRE74J55O20110520
Important Issues in Trucking Accidents
Imagine if that compact car that just rear-ended you at a stoplight was instead a tractor-trailer semi truck. As an example, a 1999 Honda Civic weighs a little over 3400 pounds, while a semi-tractor with a large sleeper weighs around 20,000 pounds. With the addition of a trailer the maximum weight allowable in Texas is 80,000 pounds. It is obvious that the forces involved in a collision with such a heavy vehicle are drastically magnified. Unfortunately, these magnified forces often result in much more serious personal injuries and property damages.
The trucking industry is highly regulated. There are rules, regulations, and laws that cover everything from maximum weight and size of vehicles to the number of hours a driver can be on the road. A primary reason for all of these Federal and state rules is to increase the safety of over the road trucking. Unfortunately, people cut corners either purposely or through lack of vigilance and sometimes these rules are broken. Often an overly sleepy driver or a trucking company that allows overweight or oversized loads gets away with it and no one is hurt. Sometimes, the results are catastrophic and deadly.
A typical over the road driver gets paid by the mile, the more miles he drives the larger his paycheck. The obvious motivation is for the driver to driver longer and faster. The longer a driver drives the more tired he becomes, the faster he drives the more difficult it is to control and stop the truck. Taken to an extreme, drivers may take amphetamines or other drugs to keep themselves awake. Invariably, these stimulants alter the driver’s perceptions and can give a sense of false control and well being to the drugged driver.
The U.S. Department of Transportation makes rules about work hours and other working conditions of drivers engaged in interstate commerce. A driver may drive for up to 11 hours and work for up to 14 hours in total. Thereafter, 10 hours off-duty is required. A driver may not drive if he has worked for 60 hours in the past 7 days or 70 hours in the past 8 days unless they take 34 or more hours off-duty. Most drivers are required to document their time in a logbook.
If you have been the victim of an accident with a truck there are many questions that should be asked. Is the driver licensed to operate this truck? Is the driver “legal” that is, has he abided by the maximum driving time limits? Is all required safety equipment present on the truck? Has the truck been inspected recently to insure it passed minimum requirements? Was the driver impaired at the time? Did the driver abide by his own company’s policies and procedures?
If you or a loved one has been in such an accident there is a good chance it has had serious consequences. A typical layman without experience in this field may not know the right questions to ask. An experienced attorney can help sift through the mass of regulations, laws, and other factors and advise you accordingly. Contact the Law Office of Julie Johnson, PLLC for a free consultation.