Whistleblower David Goodstein former Director of Education for the Kaplan owned CHI Institute in Broomall, PA was intimately involved in 2006 when an investigation by the State of Pennsylvania into the Medical Surgical Technician program began. When it was suggested by management he bribe local hospital CFO’s with $5,000 or $10,000 dollar gifts to find extern sites for our students he pointed out that to hospitals charging $125 for an aspirin $5k or $10k wasn’t very much money. Perhaps a better solution was to just tell the truth. Kaplan decided he didn’t really grasp the gravity of the situation and the next day they escorted him out the door with my carton of personal belongings.
Kaplan Higher Education Corp, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington Post purchased the CHI Institute in Broomall, PA along with many other schools during its expansion phase during the early part of this decade. The Medical Surgical Technician program, although very popular and profitable, had difficulty finding a sufficient number of extern sites from its very beginning.
Students, mostly young minority women, signed up for an $18,000, 50 week program of study to become a Medical Surgical Technician. It was an intense four term program that trained students to assist in the operating room during surgical procedures. The required fourth term was 500 hours as an extern in a bona-fide hospital operating room environment. After completing the program the students could sit for a national certification exam and then likely find employment at excellent salaries in hospitals and out-patient surgical centers. Over 90% of the students in the program applied for federal Title IV loans to finance the cost of tuition and these loans, through private lenders, were guaranteed by the federal government. Many students needed to obtained co-signers to qualify for the loans and had intended to repay the loans when gainfully employed in their chosen field after graduation.
After completing the first three terms students were told that there were no extern sites available and to go home and wait until the school called them. They went home and waited, weeks, months, years and some are still waiting. In the meanwhile their student loans for the first three courses became due after six months and they were saddled with debts of more than $13,000 and nothing to show for it but a bunch of non-transferable credits that are worthless. Most are not able or willing to repay the loans and have defaulted. These defaulted loans have been or will be repaid by the Education Department with tax dollars paid by you and me. Kaplan, however, gets to keep every cent of the tuition charged whether the students finish the program or not. attend.
Title: So You Want to Blow Your Whistle: Confessions of a Whistle Blower
Source: Daily Censored, December 6, 2010
Author: David Goodstein
URL: http://dailycensored.com/2010/12/06/so-you-want-to-blow-your-whistle-confessions-of-a-whistle-blower/
Facultiy Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Sonoma State University