Last year, we brought you the story of 13 graduates of Everest College’s Dallas campus who filed a lawsuit claiming they had been misled by the for-profit school into believing they would be able to find jobs and transfer their credits upon graduation. Now, a handful of Everest alums in Utah have filed a similar lawsuit, alleging fraud by the school.

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

The suit, filed Friday in Salt Lake City’s 3rd District Court, alleges Everest’s recruiters subjected prospective students to high-pressure sales tactics that omitted or distorted crucial information about the transferability of credits, as well as the debt loads associated with enrolling.

As mentioned in our story from yesterday about the GAO’s report on the dramatic increase in federal student aid to students at for-profit schools, many graduates of these institutions discover too late that the classes they have borrowed large sums of money to pay for often do not transfer to other colleges and universities.

Says the lawyer for the plaintiffs, “Sadly, based on these misrepresentations, they completed their associate’s degrees and then learned that the degree was useless for transferring to a school where they could get a bachelor’s… The money they borrowed was wasted. That creates a problem not just for the students who took out the loans, but also causes a problem for the federal government that is issuing the loans.”

In a related story, the Everest College campus in San Bernadino, CA, was recently singled out by the federal government as having the highest student loan default rate in the state, with over 30% of federal loans being defaulted on in 2008.

Everest College grads sue, alleging fraud [Salt Lake Tribune]
For-profit Everest College has highest student loan default rate in state [CaliforniaWatch.org]

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