Dig into lawsuit exhibits
Sharona Coutts of ProPublica.org and Amy Scott of American Public Media’s “Marketplace” teamed up to look at allegations of deceptive recruiting tactics at the University of Phoenix. They quoted Congressman George Miller of California, who has likened problems in student lending to another recent crisis: subprime mortgages.
Sharona’s story starts by noting the nearly $10 million settlement that the University of Phoenix’s parent company paid in 2004 to resolve federal regulators’ allegations of systematic enrollment abuses. The story continues:
“Some of the school’s recruiters have continued to use high-pressure, deceptive tactics, according to a dozen current and former students and two former recruiters who spoke to ProPublica and ‘Marketplace’ as part of a joint investigation. “
Sharona Coutts
“It’s a story that’s based heavily on the experience of individuals,” Sharona says. “We needed to grapple with the question of how many people do we need to talk to before [we can] be comfortable that we’re picking up a pattern.”
The University of Phoenix, in a response to the stories posted on its Web site, disagreed that the reporters had documented the trend: “ProPublica produced – and Marketplace aired – a two-part series founded on nothing more than a series of anecdotes from five of our 17,000 employees (.03 percent of our employee population) and from 12 of our 443,000 students (.0027 percent of our student population).”
Sharona says the exhibits filed in a whistleblower lawsuit supported the assertions that their sources – who were not parties to the lawsuit — made. The university’s parent company, Apollo Group Inc., recently set aside $80.5 million to settle the lawsuit, which makes allegations similar to those in the 2004 investigation.
Today’s Tip: Study the exhibits attached to lawsuits.
Sharona says the exhibits provided evidence, such as e-mails from employees, that demonstrated the pressure managers put on recruiters.
“You can get a lot of really compelling stuff in exhibits,” Sharona says.
