The U.S. Department of Education has begun a review of Corinthian Colleges Inc. over the higher-education company’s advertised job-placement rates, The Huffington Post reported.
Corinthian disclosed the department’s inquiry on Wednesday in a quarterly earnings statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said it received notice of the review last month in a letter from the Education Department. Last year the news website published an investigation asserting that some Corinthian campuses had padded their job-placement numbers.
The company stated that the department had denied many of its pending new-program applications, and had requested more information “for the purpose of ascertaining that the company and its institutions have the administrative capability to comply with Title IV requirements.”
The company said it disputed the department’s assertion that it had admitted falsifying job-placement rates and other information, but it planned to cooperate with the department’s review. Corinthian is also facing a series of other state and federal inquiries.
In a quarterly earnings conference call on Wednesday, Corinthian chief executive Jack Massimino said the company had not yet met with the Department of Education regarding the letter. But he strongly disagreed with the suggestion that the company had “admitted wrongdoing.”
Instead, Massimino said the company believes the department is referencing “isolated instances over a four-year period when we detected false or erroneous information” and then disciplined or dismissed lower-level employees who were involved.
“When we find issues, we take corrective action and we report them,” Massimino said on the call. “It’s our goal to get together with (the Department of Education) and bring them out to our organization and give them an opportunity to see what we do and how we do it.”
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