Filed under Questionable trade school practices, Trade Schools
Corinthian Colleges is the largest chain of trade and career schools in North America. It is publicly traded (NASDAQ: COCO) with happy shareholders still beaming about the last quarterly report announcing the company has increased profits again, this time with a net income of $1.95 million ($0.02 per share) compared to $1.40 million for the same quarter (Q1) last year.
Not everyone is happy with Corinthian Colleges, though. The chain has been the target of several lawsuits related to the fact that its graduates do not find the good jobs promised and so end up in default on student loan payments.
A little over a month ago (October 16th and 17th), three Florida campuses owned by Corinthian were raided by federal investigators on behalf of the U.S. Education Department as part of an “ongoing investigation.” Campuses of the National School of Technology in Fort Lauderdale and Florida Career College‘s campuses in Lauderdale Lakes and Pembroke Pines were the subject of the raids. Corinthian denied any wrongdoing or knowledge of the basis for the investigation and investigators declined comment citing the ongoing investigation. Many people are watching Corinthian, though, including us. We’ll admit that some of the schools operated by Corinthian are advertised on this site; they include CDI, Everest and Wyotech. We’re not sure what, if anything, to do about that just yet.
In July of 2007, Corinthian agreed to a $6.5 million settlement in a lawsuit filed by California‘s attorney general. The suit claimed that Corinthian’s subsidiaries overstated the number of graduates who found jobs and how much they were making in income. Corinthian operates over 120 schools across North America. Keep an eye on and out for Corinthian.
One particularly vociferous blog on Corinthian can be found here http://voptsslf.blogspot.com/2007/11/school-by-any-other-name-nec-nit.html. We do not necessarily support the opinions or the practices of any third party sites linked to from this site.
