College accreditor ACCSC has renewed approval of four for-profit colleges owned by California-based International Education Corp. (IEC), a company that was forced to shut down many of its campuses in the past year after a U.S. Department of Education investigation revealed the schools were rigging student entrance exams and engaging in other fraudulent conduct.
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memo dated November 15, ACCSC noticed the public that it had renewed accreditation of four IEC-owned schools for five years, which is the maximum period of renewal that ACCSC grants to colleges. Three of the schools — in Gardena, Riverside, and Sacramento, California — are branded as UEI College, while the fourth, called United Education Institute, is in Las Vegas.
Abuses at IEC schoolsIn February, the Department of Education
terminated financial aid eligibility to another IEC-owned chain called Florida Career College, and the school closed. As part of the resolution of that matter, the CEO of IEC, Fardad Fateri, stepped down. The
Department acted because it found, as described in a detailed
38-page letter sent to FCC in April 2023, blatant cheating at FCC on “ability-to-benefit” entrance exams for students without a high school diploma.
Republic Report, relying on interviews with numerous FCC staff, had
first exposed that long-running rampant misconduct, along with other blatant recruiting and financial abuses, at FCC. FCC’s misbehavior lured numerous students — veterans, single parents, immigrants, and other struggling Americans — into low-quality school programs that left them deep in debt and without the career advancement they sought.
The Department’s February
settlement agreement with IEC indicated that the Department had an open investigation of potential violations at UEI similar to those found at FCC. The settlement barred UEI from administering ATB tests going forward. As part of the settlement, the Department agreed to end its investigation of UEI, if UEI complied with the settlement agreement. That investigation of UEI is apparently now over.
However, a September 2023 letter from ACCSC to IEC
revealed that the company was also under investigation by California’s attorney general. It’s unclear whether that investigation remains open.
ACCSC was not the accreditor of Florida Career College, but it does accredit some of the UEI campuses. Soon after the Department announced in April 2023 that it was moving to cut off federal student aid to FCC, ACCSC placed UEI College and International Education Corp. on “System-Wide Warning” status,
citing the Department’s findings that senior IEC leaders knew of and encouraged the cheating, and also citing IEC’s alleged failure to inform ACCSC of the Department’s investigation in a timely manner. ACCSC also noted that IEC had voluntarily halted ability-to-benefit testing and enrollment at UEI; the accreditor’s May 2023 order included a requirement that such testing and enrollment be suspended — suggesting already that there might be questions about ATB testing at UEI.
Yet now ACCSC has renewed accreditation for IEC/UEI schools for the maximum period, the same renewal that it would grant to the best-behaving schools. The renewals are effective back to dates in 2020 and 2022, reflecting in part that ACCSC delayed decisions on renewal while the schools were being evaluated, so the schools must seek renewal again soon. But it’s fair to ask whether the full five-year renewals were appropriate, or whether, instead, ACCSC continues to tolerate college abuses, to the detriment of both students and of the U.S. taxpayers who support the hundreds of millions in federal financial aid that have flowed to ACCSC schools.
ACCSC executive director Michale McComis did not respond to a request for comment regarding the renewal for the IEC schools.
Abuses at other ACCSC-accredited schoolsThe question of ACCSC’s tolerance for predatory college abuses is again squarely presented as ACCSC faces its own next review: its application to be renewed in 2026 by the Department of Education as a recognized accreditor, a status that allows schools it accredits to be eligible for federal student grants and loans. The maximum renewal period for this gatekeeper status is also five years. That review process is
already underway at the Department.
The last time ACCSC was up for renewal, in 2021, the Department, citing failures by ACCSC in curbing long-running abuses at another awful predatory college operation, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education (owner of now-shuttered Independence University),
delayed renewal of recognition, required ACCSC to explain its conduct, and ultimately extended ACCSC f0r three years instead of five — although the way the process went forward, the practical effect, disappointingly,
was a five year renewal.
Data shows many ACCSC schools have left students
worse off than when they started.
Since ACCSC’s last review, the accreditor has engaged in other troubling behavior.
Most notably, as Republic Report first
reported, in July 2023, ACCSC had watched while Atlantis University, a Miami-based for-profit school, acted in blatant violation of an ACCSC rule governing the use of “branch campuses” tied to a school’s central campus. Atlantis’s executive director was, at the time, the chair of ACCSC.
The Atlantis branch campus, called Florida Palms University,
shut down soon after our report.
ACCSC then put Atlantis on warning status, via a letter that, as we noted at the time, was heavily redacted in the version released to the public. Whatever problems the many blacked-out passages of the October 2023 letter concealed stood in sharp contrast to ACCSC’s unconditional five-year renewal of Atlantis in December 2022. ACCSC removed Atlantis from warning status by February 2024.
This year, after Republic Report had repeatedly been able to learn valuable information about the bad behavior of some ACCSC-accredited schools through the public release of detailed letters from the accreditor to schools like UEI and Atlantis — at least the unredacted portions — ACCSC moved away from transparency and accountability. It started releasing, instead of the actual letters to schools,
vague summaries that keep the public in the dark about what is actually happening.
ACCSC is also the accreditor of troubled Connecticut-based for-profit
Paier College, which
faces possible closure after losing access to federal student aid and having been sued for deceptive practices by the state’s attorney general. ACCSC placed Paier on warning status in June, citing low graduation rates and weak validation of faculty credentials. But that action by ACCSC came six months after the school, facing scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Education, voluntarily withdrew from eligibility for federal student grants and loans.
Another ACCSC school, Career College of Northern Nevada (CCNN),
abruptly closed in February, replacing its website with a closure notice and literally locking students out of the building.
In June 2023, yet another ACCSC-accredited school, Hussian College,
suddenly shut down. In June 2022, ACCSC had put Hussian on system-wide warning, citing concerns about student achievement at the schools. But ACCSC removed the warning and renewed Hussian’s accreditation in December 2022.
ACCSC also accredits Florida’s for-profit Southeastern College. There is much evidence suggesting that that school, owned by ultra-rich Floridians Arthur and Belinda Keiser,
effectively receives improper subsidies from Keiser University, a non-profit college
controlled by the Keisers.
ACCSC’s renewal application and the new Trump administrationMembers of the public have
until December 6 to submit written comments to the Department of Education regarding ACCSC’s bid for renewal.
The Biden administration, and U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, to their credit, took much more seriously the Department’s obligation to review accreditors for their vigilance in guarding against predatory college abuses than
the first Trump administration and Secretary Betsy DeVos did. If the second Trump administration, and new education secretary pick Linda McMahon, truly want to help students, and truly want to implement the incoming administration’s professed
commitment to rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in federal government programs, then it should continue the Biden team’s work of
holding predatory colleges accountable — and also holding accountable the accreditors that allow such abuses to persist.
