A national advocacy group for student veterans that kicked out 40 chapters at for-profit colleges this month for allegedly providing misleading information to prospective students plans to release on Thursday the names of 26 chapters that remain suspended.
The organization, Student Veterans of America, or SVA, revoked the 40 chapters’ membership three weeks ago after officials discovered that the institutions had listed administrators, not students, as primary contacts and used institutional Web sites and recruitment pages as chapter sites. The group has since reinstated 14 chapters, with up-to-date contact information, after verifying that they are indeed led by students.
The announcement on Thursday will name the 26 chapters—including those at 13 campuses affiliated with Education Management Corporation, the nation’s second-largest publicly traded for-profit higher education company—that have not been reinstated.
Michael Dakduk, executive director of SVA, said he was concerned that some for-profit colleges were taking advantage of the organization’s well-known brand to legitimize their programs. If a campus lists a registrar, an enrollment adviser, or other administrator, as the 26 ousted chapters allegedly did, that compromises the organization’s goal of connecting veterans directly to one another, said Mr. Dakduk. It threatens its credibility, he said.
“We’re worried that some may just be using it to appear that they’re veteran- or military-friendly,” he said in an interview.
The student-veterans’ group has 35 for-profit-college chapters in good standing, including the 14 that were reinstated, Mr. Dakduk said. The recent scrutiny is “not because we’re picking on the for-profits,” he said. “It’s because we don’t know that for-profits have the same standards of handling student organizations that traditional brick-and-mortar institutions have.” This week, SVA officials sent a 10-question survey to its 35 for-profit-college chapters to determine how much independence they have from administrators.
John (Jack) W. Bergman, a retired lieutenant general in the Marine Corps who serves as Education Management Corporation’s military liaison, said in a written statement provided to The Chronicle that officials there had contacted SVA weeks ago, after learning in news reports of its allegations against for-profits, to ask if any of the company’s institutions were involved.
“We have since learned that a handful of our 109 schools across the country were being called into question,” he said. “Several of these schools have already been reinstated and have chapters in good standing with SVA. We expect the rest will be soon, as well.”
Still, SVA has “raised important concerns” about how colleges recruit veterans, Mr. Bergman said. “We neither condone nor support any activity which does not have the best interests of our student veterans in mind,” he said.
Education Management Corporation, which operates Argosy University, the Art Institutes, South University, and Brown Mackie Colleges, is the defendant in a federal whistle-blower lawsuit brought by a former employee of one of its colleges. The suit, in which the Department of Justice intervened last year, accuses the company of illegally obtaining student aid by awarding commissions to recruiters.
The announcement by the student-veterans group comes a week after federal lawmakers issued their latest salvo against the for-profit sector’s recruitment of veterans and military students. Last week, Sen. Kay Hagan, Democrat of North Carolina, and Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, introduced a bill that would bar all colleges from using federal student-aid dollars for marketing and advertising. The legislation is aimed at the for-profit industry, whose companies spend heavily on marketing—an average of 23 percent of their budgets, according to a recent Senate report—and have been accused of singling out veteran students on the Post-9/11 GI Bill.
The following institutions’ chapters remain suspended by Student Veterans of America.
Allied American U.
Anthem College—Online
Argosy U.—Online
Argosy U.—Inland Empire
Art Institute of California—Orange County
Art Institute of California—Sacramento
Art Institute of Michigan
Art Institute of New York City
Art Institute of Pittsburgh
Art Institute of Pittsburgh—Online
Art Institute of Washington
Art Institutes International—Kansas City
Ashworth College
Brown Mackie College—Akron
DeVry U.—Orlando
ECPI College of Technology—Innsbrook
ECPI College of Technology—Raleigh
ECPI College of Technology—Moorefield
Ex’Pression College for Digital Arts
Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising
ITT Technical Institute—South Bend
ITT Technical Institute—Springfield (Mo.)
ITT Technical Institute—Strongsville
Medical Careers Institute
South U.—Montgomery
South U.—Savannah
