After car accidents and back surgery left her unable to work in 2000, Patricia Ann Bowers decided to make productive use of her new, medically-imposed free time. “I decided that, being disabled, I should go for my dream of having my college degree in marketing,” Bowers said.
Bowers, now 54, had worked in marketing for Piper Aircraft in Florida for six years before the accidents. At first the marketing degree “was just a thought in my mind,” but then she saw some TV commercials for Everest College and started to wonder if online classes could be the path she needed.
“Just out of curiosity I called them up. I really didn’t expect anything to happen from the phone call,” Bowers told ThinkProgress, but the school kept calling for weeks. “They told me they could accomodate me, that I had enough funding.”
And Everest — a brand belonging to for-profit education giant Corinthian Colleges — was quite accommodating indeed, at least at the start. She started working on her Associates’ Degree in 2011, and had moved on to Bachelor’s classes starting in 2013.
On Father’s Day, 2013, Bowers’ youngest son killed himself. He was just 34. In the months that followed, Everest’s accommodating attitude evaporated.
“I tried to get a leave of absence,” she said, but “they made me keep my participation up to keep from getting kicked out of school.” Everest has no leave-of-absence policy, everyone told her, so she’d just have to stick it out. “Everyone including my professors encouraged me to stay in school, but this is my child we’re talking about,” she said. “They’re telling me, he wouldn’t want you to let your school go, making me feel like I’d be letting my son down if I grieved for him, that my education was more important than losing my child.”
Staff swore Bowers would be able to retake the classes at no additional cost if she failed them, and insisted she’d be better off educationally and financially if she pushed through and scored all Fs than if she got booted from the semester. But none of that proved true.
(Corinthian made) me feel like I’d be letting my son down if I grieved for him, that my education was more important than losing my child.
Retaking the classes that fall racked up more debt. She estimated she owes a total of $57,000 to the federal government for the loans that padded Corinthian’s bottom line, though she was never able to complete her Bachelor’s Degree or begin the Master’s she’d always wanted.
Today, the company is folding. Bowers is deep in debt and unable to complete her education at another school because Everest swallowed up six years’ worth of her college funding in just three years. And the federal government is helping ensure that Corinthian’s campuses get transitioned into a new brand of non-traditional colleges rather than letting the company collapse, which would help people like Bowers get out from under their debts.
The experience has left Bowers so deeply discouraged with the entire system of higher education financing in the country that she’s joining a radical, risky new attempt to force changes.
On Monday, Bowers and 14 other Corinthian students launched a debt strike, informing the Department of Education (DOE) that they have no intention of repaying the debts incurred through their tortuous Corinthian experiences.
The “Corinthian 15” hope to convince many thousands more students buried in educational debt to band together and refuse to pay, triggering a broad reevaluation of how America finances higher education. Organizers from activist group The Debt Collective are helping to coordinate the strike and provide legal counsel to the strikers.
But this isn’t a conflict between students and a private company, or not merely that. It’s also a battle between the Corinthian 15 and the federal government. The strikers are not just fighting back against the company that buried them in debt, but against the government that is enforcing those debts. And beyond whatever ethical interest the public might have in these stories, we also have a financial one: the for-profit industry relies almost entirely on taxpayer money in the form of federal student loans.
Students and radical debt activists want DOE to flat-out cancel the life-ruining debts that both current and former Corinthian customers carry. They haven’t yet gotten a toe-hold with the feds — these debts must still be repaid, under the terms of a DOE-facilitated deal to sell Corinthian campuses to a debt collections company that will be making its first ever attempt to actually provide classroom education — but they’ve also only just begun to fight.http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/02/28/3628028/whats-the-deal-with-government-helping-corinthian/