In summary
It’s hard to find the disciplinary history of for-profit colleges regulated by California. CalMatters is making it easier.
California legislators and the state attorney general have derided some for-profit career colleges and trade schools as predatory and fraudulent. But outside of a few high-profile lawsuits, the state has struggled to regulate them.
CalMatters has released a tool to help current and prospective students look up a private school’s disciplinary history and its licensing status.
Our tool looks at public information for nearly 2,000 schools inspected by California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, which is largely responsible for licensing and disciplining the state’s private colleges. Those schools collectively served 530,000 students in 2023, according to Matt Woodcheke, a spokesperson for the bureau.
If a school’s issues are so severe that the bureau revokes its license, then it’s no longer allowed to enroll new students. In most cases, though, the bureau disciplines a school but allows it to keep its license, at least temporarily. These schools can also face civil and criminal lawsuits, disciplinary actions by their accrediting agencies, and investigations by the U.S. Department of Education.
Prior to the bureau, similar state agencies had a “long and troubled past” as they struggled to regulate for-profit colleges in California, wrote the California State Auditor’s Office in a 2014 report. Not much has changed, the report notes, as the bureau has “consistently failed to meet its responsibility to protect the public’s interests.” In one instance, the audit found that the bureau took more than a year to respond to a complaint about an unapproved flight school that was illegally sponsoring visas and charging $30,000 in tuition without providing any flight training. The audit recommended the bureau make numerous, immediate changes to its operating policies, but its problems lingered.
In 2018, CalMatters reported that the bureau still took nearly a year and a half, on average, to finish investigating complaints against for-profit schools, delays that forced at least one student to miss a deadline to qualify for loan forgiveness. That year, state legislators introduced new bills in an effort to increase oversight of for-profit schools, especially after the Trump Administration rolled back many federal regulations. Ultimately, few of the proposed state bills passed.
In a recent investigation, CalMatters found that it took years to revoke some schools’ licenses, despite reports of issues, such as unqualified teachers and fraud. As the bureau adjudicated complaints, those schools continued to enroll students and receive public subsidies, a violation of state policy. Today, it’s still hard to find details about the licensing and disciplinary past of institutions under its watch. The bureau uses complex, legal terminology and presents the information on separate pages. While the current website is “not ideal,” said Bureau Chief Deborah Cochrane, “it is comprehensive”: The site should have documentation for any past violation or licensing issue dating back to 2010.
“We need to move into the 21st century,” she said, adding that the agency will update its data system this year, making it easier for students to browse.
Other challenges loom. The bureau faces a “substantial” financial deficit that could total as much as $11 million by the 2028-29 budget year, wrote Cochrane to California state legislators last year. That financial forecast “threatens the Bureau’s ability to protect consumers” and requires “immediate action,” she wrote. The Legislature has yet to respond to Cochrane’s letter.