Not long ago, Amber Brown, a student at Everest University, saw an article on Facebook about one of the many lawsuits against her school. The story, she wrote to BuzzFeed News, "dumbfounded" her: It mentioned former students facing mountains of debt for their degrees, but that didn't seem to apply to her. Brown believed that she was "on a 100% Pell Grant through the government" and didn't owe a cent.
Everest even paid for her books and her laptop, she wrote, and sent her a stipend check every semester. "Will I have to pay this back or am I one of the few students being treated genuinely by Everest University?" she asked.
In reality, most of what Brown believed to be a Pell Grant was actually loans: A review of documents she provided showed she owes more than $26,000.
Brown, 29, who lives in Kentucky and enrolled at Everest in 2011, has yet to learn that she is going into debt for her degree. (Her last name has been changed because she is a current student.) She no longer has a phone because she is unable to pay the bills, and she sent her student loan documents from a computer at a nearby food bank where she accesses the internet. She has since been hospitalized, unreachable by phone or email.
Like thousands of other students, Brown has fallen victim to a predatory lender that exploits the aspirations of the poor and disadvantaged. She had good reason to trust Everest Colleges and Universities and its representatives: It is a nationally accredited college, plugged into the government-backed student loan system that pays for the education of millions of students each year. But for thousands of desperate and financially unsophisticated students at Everest, that trust was deeply misplaced.
Corinthian Colleges, Everest's publicly traded parent company, is facing a slew of lawsuits and investigations alleging it falsified job records and misrepresented itself to students. The company is effectively being shut down by the federal government; by early next year, it will no longer own any colleges.
Since July, I have heard from more than 150 current and former students who reached out to me through email, phone, text message, and Facebook after a story about Everest I wrote in April began circulating widely among former students. The vast majority I spoke to were poor women, many of them minorities, who said they were lured to enroll with promises of jobs and good wages that would support their families. They told me they had taken out tens of thousands of dollars in loans, often without understanding the extent of their debt, and sometimes not even knowing they were in debt at all. The tactics that admissions officers had used to convince them to enroll, they said, were manipulative and unethical; lawsuits allege they were illegal.
By the end of their programs, students owed as much as $50,000, and few believe they will ever be able to repay even a fraction of it. Most said they graduated without jobs, then returned to unemployment or low-paying work in fast-food or retail. They used words like "betrayed," "lied to," and "victimized." Many begged for help.
Corinthian, Everest’s parent company, has routinely denied most of the allegations in the many lawsuits against the company. Its spokesperson, Kent Jenkins, said that Corinthian has found employment for the "vast majority" of its tens of thousands of graduates, and that the school regularly provided students with "clear and accurate" information about the cost of their educations and the ability of credits to transfer. He denied that admissions representatives used aggressive or unethical tactics to coerce students into enrolling. Corinthian's accreditation and job placement standards, he said, are far more stringent than those at community colleges offering similar programs.
Corinthian is being sued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and attorneys general in California, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, and faces investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and six more states, as well as a criminal probe in California. Earlier this year, the Department of Education reached an unprecedented agreement to essentially shut down Corinthian, which was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
But for more than half a million current and former students, neither the shutdown nor the many lawsuits really matter. They will likely see little to no debt relief on their federal loans. They will see none of the jobs they believe they were promised. And while the company may be closing its doors, 85 of Everest’s campuses aren’t: They will be sold off, likely to other for-profit college operators or to private equity investors, and will continue to recruit and enroll students.
The administration office entrance at Everest College in Santa Ana, California.
Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times / MCT
At every step of the way, people fell prey to Everest precisely because of tactics designed to capitalize on their poverty and their trust in an accredited university. Its advertisements targeted poor and minority students, capitalizing on their desperation for jobs to get them on the phone with admissions representatives. Those salespeople used classic high-pressure tactics to sign them up for programs that were up to five times the price of similar offerings at a community college, and twice as much as a state university. One former employee called the tactics she had been taught "beyond deceptive and immoral."
For many students, a major life decision that was meant to lift them out of poverty has left them more deeply entrenched in it.
Photograph by Molly Hensley-Clancy for BuzzFeed News
If you want to see an advertisement for Everest, the best place to look is on daytime television. Airing during shows like Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, and The Price Is Right, Everest’s low-budget ads frequently feature young men and women talking candidly, and sometimes sharply, into the camera. In one, a young black man standing in a dark parking lot commands: “You’re sitting on the couch, watching TV, and your life’s passing you by … You spend all day on the phone anyhow, why don’t you make a phone call that’s gonna help you in your future?” He adds, shaking his head dismissively, “It’s easy.” Another features a woman standing on a freeway overpass.
The minute those who see Everest’s commercials make that phone call, they are met with a fine-tuned sales machine intended to get them to enroll as quickly as possible. Students spoke of receiving phone calls daily, even four or five times a day. The calls didn’t end until they agreed to speak at length with an admissions representative, by phone or on campus.
Everest’s admissions representatives are salespeople — the jobs are advertised as such by Corinthian, according to the California lawsuit. What they sell, though, is something much bigger than a college education, or even the promises of job placement services and $12 hourly salaries. They sell prospective students a future that many of them never imagined was possible.
Students told me they felt they had no choice but to enroll. Not to do so, they said, seemed like turning down a guarantee at a better life for themselves and their families. “They put on a great act saying how many jobs were available and how good I was gonna get paid,” Cacha Cherry, who graduated from Everest in 2010, wrote in an email about the first day she visited an Everest campus. “They told me about people who had gotten a job and had wonderful careers and great lives — how they were able to buy homes, go on vacations, and live this wonderful life.”
Cherry had no intention of enrolling that day, but the representatives prepared papers for her to sign, despite her protests. “I felt pressured to sign because I wanted to make a good living for my child — I was a young mother trying to make a better life for both of us.”
A former admissions representative at Everest, one of five with whom I communicated, said Everest taught a sales tactic her supervisors called “peeling the onion,” appealing to students’ emotions by asking them leading questions that focused on their hopes and dreams. “We’d say, ‘How do you think this degree will change your daughter’s life?’ or ‘How meaningful would being the first person in your family to graduate from college be?’ It was all about the emotional side.” She called the enrollment tactics she was taught “beyond deceptive and immoral, given the circumstances of the prospective students.”
Everest’s admissions representatives were under heavy pressure to sign up students — until recently, they were paid based in large part on how many students they enrolled, a practice that was made legal under a series of “safe harbor” laws passed by the Bush administration in 2002. Those rules were repealed by the Obama administration in 2011, but four former admissions representatives told me that their job performance was evaluated based in part on enrollment numbers.
“We had to hit certain enrollment numbers or risk our jobs,” said another former admissions representative, who asked not to be named because his current employer is also a for-profit college. “So plenty of students were enrolled that weren’t supposed to be.”
Jenkins denied this. Company-wide evaluation standards, the company spokesperson said, “do not include the number of students [admissions representatives] enroll.”
Former students said Everest’s admissions office also used tactics more akin to those found in high-pressure sales environments. Many students who visited Everest’s campus for tours or simply to pick up brochures said they found themselves ushered into the enrollment and financial aid offices, bombarded by promises about job placement and encouraged to make a choice to better their futures. To get them to enroll immediately, Everest representatives often told students that they risked losing their spot in the school or that the semester was about to begin without them," suggesting they may have to wait months or even a year before the next chance to enroll
“It was considered a failure if we didn’t enroll by the end of the day” of their first visit, said the former admissions representative. Two other former admissions officers made similar assertions. If students seemed hesitant to enroll on their first visit, one representative said, administrators "would meet with them personally" before they left campus.
Students said that as a result of the rushed, single-day process, they were given little time to read the documents they were signing. They instead trusted the word of the admissions representative who explained the documents.
“I remember feeling extremely overwhelmed and confused about what was happening, and by the end of the conversation, I’d basically signed up for the school and was beginning classes,” said LaShayna Bell, of Tempe, Arizona, who enrolled in 2010. “It was like I blinked and missed what I’d done.”
Jenkins said that it is “extremely rare” for a student to enroll on the first visit, but would not specify whether that included signing preliminary paperwork. “We encourage students to take their time and consider it carefully,” Jenkins said. “We encourage prospective students to bring a family member or close friend on the first visit, and to ask questions about all aspects of the program.”
That family member, however, sometimes turned into another opportunity for the company. Interviews with admissions representatives and former students show that Everest’s tactics were so aggressive that the school sometimes also enrolled the mothers, sisters, and spouses who accompanied prospective students on campus visits.
Photograph by Molly Hensley-Clancy for BuzzFeed News
The vast majority of Everest’s students have no prior experience with college — few relatives who attended themselves or high school counselors to help navigate the process. Sintia Lopez, a veteran, emigrated from Nicaragua when she was 12, unable to speak a word of English; she knew nobody who had ever gone to college. She believed her Everest representative when she was told that the school was one of the best in Florida, and believed the representative’s claim that the high tuition was a sign of quality education that she wouldn’t get at a community college. She didn’t know that it was abnormal for a school to call you at all hours of the day, begging you to enroll.
Admissions representatives enrolled many students who were unlikely, or even unable, to succeed in college: Among those I spoke with, more than a dozen did not have a GED, including an eighth-grade dropout who was enrolled in an accounting program. Several were violent felons who could not legally be employed in the health care industry or criminal justice jobs offered by their programs.
Many more appeared to be only semi-literate and were unprepared to handle college-level work. One student, who had completed a medical assistant program months after being released from jail on a felony assault charge, wrote to me: “I need getting loans with cleared cause I had just got out of prison and I dont a ged and they promised they would get me a job my name [redacted] please help me.” She asked not to be named because of her felony.
At Everest’s Milwaukee outpost, according to allegations in the Wisconsin attorney general’s lawsuit, the campus president insisted on turning away students with criminal records who wanted to enroll in health care programs because they could not be employed in the fields they were training for. When the president left, the suit alleges, the school not only ceased using background checks, it called back those students with criminal records who had been turned away and tried to enroll them.
A promotional mailing sent to prospective students, which was included in the complaint by Wisconsin's attorney general.
Wisconsin Attorney General / Via wordpress.com
Everest voluntarily closed the Wisconsin campus two years after its opening, acknowledging it had problems. At the urging of regulators, the company agreed to issue refunds to students who had not graduated. (Those with diplomas, regardless of whether they'd found employment, received no money.) Jenkins said the fact that the company had ultimately shut down the Wisconsin campus was evidence that Corinthian was committed to addressing wrongdoing.
“It is not in our interest to enroll students who can not successfully complete their courses, and we have policies that are based on that understanding," Jenkins said.
In 2009, according to regulatory filings, 23% of Corinthian students did not have high school diplomas or GEDs. The company stopped enrolling students without diplomas in 2010, after the government no longer allowed them to receive federal financial aid.
The first former admissions representative spoke of enrolling many students who had such limited English proficiency that she believed them unable to complete their courses, such as a mother and daughter she enrolled in a massage therapy course — which requires learning anatomy and physiology — who “could not carry on a basic conversation” in English. Her boss, the admissions representative said, told her to “put them through anyway” and ensure they sat in the class for at least five days, enough time for the school to collect their government funding. The mother and daughter did not make it through the semester.
Photograph by Molly Hensley-Clancy for BuzzFeed News
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