PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN 6) — Students at a local college got a rude awakening Sunday after Corinthian Colleges announced it will be closing all of its remaining 28 campuses, displacing 16,000 students.
Heald College in Northeast Portland informed its students via e-mail that the institution would be shutting down unexpectedly. KOIN 6 News spoke with students and families who said the news caused some to panic about their futures.
“It’s kind of flooring when one day you’re a student at somewhere and the next day or over a two-day period of a weekend, your whole world is flipped upside down,” Leigh Anne Makuch, mother of a Heald student, said.
The news came less than two weeks after the U.S. Department of Education announced it was fining Corinthian Colleges $30 million for misrepresentation. Corinthian was one of the country’s largest for-profit educational institutions. It collapsed last summer amid a cash shortage and fraud allegations.
The Education Department contends that Corinthian failed to comply with requests to address allegations of falsifying job placement data and altering grades and attendance records. It agreed to sell or close its campuses under pressure from the department.
Earlier in April, the department fined subsidiary Heald College, alleging the school had shown a pattern of falsifying post-graduation employment data. In one instance, the company’s Honolulu campus declared a student had found work in her chosen field of accounting, even though administrators knew she was working at Taco Bell, the department said.
Local student Traci Stewart told KOIN 6 News she has taken classes at Heald College since 2010. After earning her associates degree in medical billing and coding, she continued her education at Heald with the hopes of becoming a pharmacy technician.
“I am scared and nervous, hoping that it won’t affect my externship at all because I really want to get out there and get working as soon as I can” Stewart said. “I would hate to lose it now when I’m so close.”
Ben Cannon with Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission said he and his team will exercise every tool at their discretion to ensure students can continue with their education.
“I can promise that our staff will be available to assist them in transitions and I think that it’s very very likely that they will have good options for continuing their education at a local institution,” Cannon said.
In a statement Sunday, the Santa Ana, California-based company said it was working with other schools to help students continue their education. The closures include Heald College campuses in California, Hawaii and Oregon, as well as Everest and WyoTech schools in California, Arizona and New York.
To read the entire statement, click here. To read the letter sent to students, click here.The Associated Press contributed to this report