Scam Schools
Students deserve a quality education—not deception and debt.
Predatory for-profit schools plague the American higher education system, aggressively recruiting students into high-cost, low-quality education and training programs with false promises. As the abuses of this industry continue to come to light, Protect Borrowers has launched investigations into the companies and practices that allow these schools to operate with impunity, raking in billions of dollars in federal student aid while student loan borrowers are driven deeper into debt.
WHAT WE’RE DOING
Investigating For-profit colleges
Private companies claim to provide education and training to students across the economy, promising careers in fields from tech to healthcare. Too often, these companies scam students, promising the American Dream and delivering debt and distress. We investigate and build lawsuits against scam schools, including the corporations that run global for-profit colleges and fly-by-night training providers who target first-generation students, military families, and students of color.
Holding Private companies renting schools’ brands
Across higher education, private companies known as Online Program Managers or OPMs contract with colleges and universities to provide services ranging from marketing, recruitment, and advertising to instruction and curriculum development. Often, students are unaware of the existence of the private company and the role it plays in their education. Students take on debt to access what they believe to be a quality education from a name-brand institution with a good reputation, when they’re actually attending a low-quality online program run by a private firm. We are working with policymakers to protect students from OPMs, and calling on regulators to investigate the partnerships and enforce existing consumer protection laws.
By The Numbers
1-in-3 students Secure a job
100s of 1000s borrowers
Hundreds of thousands of borrowers have attended scam schools and are waiting for student debt relief.
$Millions per year
Private companies that rent schools’ brand names for online programs rake in millions of dollars per year in revenue for OPMs and their school partners.