Trade School Students No Longer Protected Under California Law
California students at for-profit colleges now have fewer legal
rights if their institution goes out of business. The state law that
regulated for-profit colleges, which enroll some 400,000 students,
expired at the end of June and lawmakers recently rejected a bill
that would replace the law, according to a Chronicle of Higher
Education article (“California's Oversight of For-Profit Colleges
Lapses as State Law Expires,” July 1, 2008).
The rejected bill would have provided tuition refunds to California
students at for-profit colleges through a state-run reimbursement
fund and would have dropped the requirement that colleges place 70
percent of their graduates in jobs. The law would have also
restricted students from suing their school over grievances.
Lawmakers, consumer advocates, and schools have battled for three
years to negotiate terms of the new law without success. Advocates
claim that some of these schools misrepresent the value and quality
of their job-oriented educational programs, which causes students to
incur large amounts of debt and leave many without viable options
for employment.
Corinthian Colleges, one of the larger for-profit schools in
California and a school that has been at the center of this
controversy, recently settled a lawsuit requiring the school to pay
$6.5 million for a charge that Corinthian exaggerated its job-
placement record, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times
(“Oversight of For-Profit Trade-Schools Expires in California,” July
1, 2008).
Robert Johnson commented that the for-profit college oversight bill
that expired in June had so many requirements that he feared it
would cripple smaller trade schools not part of a national chain
like Corinthian. Johnson, the executive director of the California Association of Private Postsecondary Schools, said that the bill “was 112 pages of punishment.”
Lawmakers believe that the bill may reemerge later this year in a
different form, although Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may veto it,
due to opposition from his Consumer Affairs Department. If the bill
were to pass, it could go into effect as early as January 2009.
Comment Notification
If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here
Subscribe to this post's comments using