Illinois attorney general's office plans to sue Westwood College
Chicago Tribune
January 19, 2012
The Illinois attorney general's office is lashing out at Westwood College, which has four Chicago-area campuses, claiming the institution misleads students enrolled in its criminal justice program, putting them deep in debt and saddling them with a nearly worthless degree for pursuing careers in Illinois law enforcement.
Westwood, a career college owned by Alta College of Denver, is the latest for-profit school to come under scrutiny by regulators and consumer advocates, who claim some for-profit schools overpromise and underdeliver.
Among the complaints are poor job-placement rates, high-pressure sales tactics, low graduation rates, excessive profit margins and the burdening of students with crushing debt, often from taxpayer-backed loans on which students default. Schaumburg-basedCareer Education Corp., for example, is dealing with fallout from a scandal in which some of its schools misrepresented job-placement rates of its graduates.
Westwood has run afoul of regulators in several states, including Texas and Wisconsin.