Campus Files
For Profit - Part 2: Thrown to the Wolves
Wed, 21 May
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Ashley Pizzuti fell in love with photography from an early age, and found what felt like the perfect opportunity to start the career of her dreams. She would soon learn that her school was part of an industry designed to prey upon students like her, and that legislators were key to finding relief. For a transcript of this episode: https://bit.ly/campusfiles-transcripts To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What were Ashley's early experiences with photography?
Going to the mailbox every month and getting that magazine was probably the best day of the month for me. I just poured over the images. Ashley took her camera everywhere she could and jumped at opportunities to use it. In high school, she worked for the yearbook and took a job at a portrait studio where she excelled. But in her mom's eyes, it was essential that she went to college.
She had dropped out of college to marry my dad, and that ended up not really working out really well for her. Her situation was always very much, you know, go to college, don't end up like me. And so I did end up going to a community college. My mom was sort of pushing me into becoming a teacher. And so I had spent my years at the community college kind of on that track.
I knew it wasn't right for me. And then once I was kind of ending that and figuring out what the next step was, I was at work at the portrait studio and I had picked up a magazine and there was an ad for Brooks Institute in there.
The Brooks Institute of Photography was a small private college in Santa Barbara, just north of L.A. Founded in 1945, it had built a solid reputation for training award-winning photographers. Ashley was connected with a recruiter named Tim. He asked her about her goals and her love for photography. He sounded really enthusiastic about the program.
And then he started asking me questions about my life. What is it like with a single mom? How is your relationship with your boyfriend? How is your relationship with your family?
These questions probably sound a bit invasive for a college recruiter. But remember, Brooks represented a dream come true and an escape. Her relationship with her mom was tense because of college. And her relationship with her boyfriend wasn't particularly healthy either. So Tim presented a way out.
He knew what time I got off work and within a few minutes of being home, my phone would ring and it would be him. How was your day? How did work go? You know, what's going on with your relationship? I would tell him details and he'd be like, oh my gosh, did he do this? Did he do this? Tim was able to tap into Ashley's struggles and he sold Brooks as a fresh start.
Get out of that town. Get away from your mom. Get away from this relationship. You're going to fall in love with Santa Barbara. This will change your life. Let's kickstart your life now. This is the life that you want. The time from when I first made that phone call to when I actually enrolled was, I think, just shy of a month.
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Chapter 2: How did Ashley choose Brooks Institute and what influenced her decision?
And the very first day of classes, with a little pep in my step, I go to the school and One of the first things she wanted to do was to say hi to Tim and to thank him for helping her get there. Fortunately, he had an office on campus.
I enter my recruiter's office where he is hastily throwing all of his personal items into a box. And he is angry. And he turns to me and he goes, I am so sorry. These people are liars. I am sorry you are in this situation. You need to watch your back. And then he grabbed his box of stuff and he left the building. And I am just standing in the doorway, completely stunned.
Like this wind has been taken out of my sails.
This is the second part of our mini-series on for-profit colleges in the U.S. Last week, you heard the basics of the industry, its history, and the damage it does to students like Mike DiGiacomo. This week, we're covering how and why it's nearly impossible for victims of for-profit schools to escape debt, and when former students fight to get relief I'm Ian Mott, and this is Campus Files.
This week, for profit, part two, thrown to the wolves. The situation with the recruiter in the office left me a little shook, but I was here. I was ready to put all my eggs into this basket.
It's the first day of class for Ashley Pizzuti. She just stopped by her recruiter's office only to find out he's been fired. He stormed out after warning her not to trust anyone at Brooks. But Ashley's just moved halfway across California and can't turn back. So she focused on getting ready for class.
I was excited about the first class. I'm there with 20 other people who are all equally as excited to be there. But right away, Ashley noticed something was off. Her classmates seemed completely unprepared. Some had never even picked up a camera before.
We were told that we had to submit portfolios during the recruitment process. And to find out that some of my classmates had never even taken a photo before this class was sort of like, that's weird. How did you get in here?
If you think this sounds a bit familiar, you'd be right. Last week, Mike DiGiacomo talked about being in a supposedly selective art school alongside people who could barely draw a face. Well, Mike was having that experience the very same semester Ashley started at Brooks. Even though they didn't know each other existed and were on opposite coasts, they actually had a lot in common.
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Chapter 3: What red flags did Ashley notice at Brooks Institute?
Brooks withdrew as much loan money as possible per student, subtracted their bill, and then handed over the small remaining amount, which was supposed to cover living expenses, equipment, and class materials. There was never any statements given. There was never any sort of paperwork that was handed to you. It was just sign up for your classes, grab your check, get out.
And just like for Mike, this all seemed normal. But then something happened, something that would completely change Ashley's experience at Brooks.
At the end of 2003, Brooks had a whistleblower. They did work with student records. She had brought the attention to the school first that the student records were not matching up to what was being filed. So their stats on graduation rates, who's enrolled, who's staying enrolled, all of those were being skewed.
The whistleblower claimed that Brooks was supplying inaccurate numbers on enrollment, graduation, and the general student experience, all of which is data that is vital for staying eligible for federal funding. Brooks was quick to assure students that the whistleblower was just a disgruntled former employee and that there was nothing to worry about. So Ashley took them at their word.
What she didn't know was that there was also a group of former Brooks students that had just sued Brooks and their parent company. The whistleblower and the lawsuits drew the attention of a division of the California Consumer Protection Bureau, which kicked off an undercover investigation.
They wrote a scathing letter to Brooks saying, this school needs to be shut down immediately. Do not enroll more students. You need to refund everyone who has attended the school. Brooks pushed back against the investigation's findings, enough that for Ashley, there was room for doubt. And she was halfway through the program, so it seemed best to stick it out.
And then New York Times published an article called The School That Skipped Ethics Class, all about Brooks and how they were misleading students. And then after that, 60 Minutes did a big report on Career Education Corporation. Not an artist? It doesn't matter anymore.
If you've ever watched daytime TV, you've probably seen one of Career Education Corporation's ads offering students a brand new life.
This was the first time Ashley learned who actually owned the Brooks Institute. It was puzzling because Ashley knew Brooks' history. It was founded shortly after World War II. The first 12 students were all returning veterans, and was run by the Brooks family for decades. It became a world-renowned school, producing Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Ashley face after graduation?
As journalists in the program, we all started to really sort of pay attention, but we were very much stuck. We did invest a ton of money, and so it was in our best interest to finish the program. So in spite of the bad press around CEC, Ashley stuck around, and graduation made it all feel worth it.
Walking in graduation was an incredible moment. It was the first time in my life that I felt like I really achieved something. Being the first in my family to graduate college, obviously my mom was very proud. That meant the world to me, knowing that I had accomplished this. And not only did I accomplish this, that I was graduating top of my class.
I had won all these awards, and I was going to change the world with my photojournalism. I was so excited to start this life that I was promised.
Now, Ashley walked at graduation, but she didn't technically have her degree yet. She still had to finish an internship, but she had one arranged, so she was invited to walk. After graduating, Ashley moved to New York City for an internship. She'd found an opportunity with two world-renowned photojournalists. It felt like things had finally come together.
She and her new boyfriend, also from Brooks, had plans to settle down in New England. And so my internship is winding down. I'm looking at what I'm going to do next. And because I had all my mail sent to my boyfriend's mother's house in Massachusetts, I didn't really get the student loan bill until he had come back to kind of help me finish out that last week and move myself home.
And so he had brought my mail and I just remember opening it up and seeing that number and just bawling. And I could not believe that I had borrowed enough to buy a house. When Ashley opened her first loan bill, she was in shock. The number on the page was almost impossible to process.
We're looking at, I think it was somewhere around $140,000 for a photography degree in journalism. $140,000 in 2006 is just over $219,000 today. Then, just when it seemed things couldn't get worse, more bad news arrived.
I had an exit interview with the school and I'm on the phone with them and they said, we know that you have moved your whole entire life to the East Coast, but we decided that some of your credits that we had agreed to transfer from your community college transcripts no longer qualify. And they said, oh, we're sorry, but you're going to need to come re-enroll.
And also you're going to have to re-enroll at our new rates. Moving back to California was an impossible ask for Ashley. So she asked if instead she could take those courses at a local community college. She's told that would work for all but one course.
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Chapter 5: How did Ashley's student debt impact her life?
We had to work a lot because we owed a lot of money. And my mom was a cosigner on my loans. My husband's mom was a cosigner on his private loans. And so our life just became this hamster wheel of trying to pay our bills. No matter how much I paid towards them, they were continuously growing. They never went down.
And perhaps most painful for Ashley was the way the debt impacted her mother and the wedge it drove between them. Because her mom was a co-signer on the loans, she was also liable for the debt. If Ashley ever fell behind on payments, her mother would be held responsible too.
The height of graduating and having her be proud of me, it's the opposite now. She's incredibly frustrated. She's disappointed. That hamster wheel continued for years, and it took a significant toll on Ashley's marriage.
We were both just really dealing with a lot of depression about our financial situation. It just felt unending. Doing the math, we would be in our 80s before we could pay these off.
Brooks traded on its historic reputation for as long as it could, but eventually the consistently weakening program and the mounting bad press became too much. In 2016, Ashley got the news that the Brooks Institute was abruptly closing its doors.
When the school shut down, it was a lot of emotions. And so I started my own Facebook group. And it quickly, you know, within weeks, grew to the hundreds. At the height of it, we had 2,000 borrowers that were just from Brooks. Almost by accident, Ashley found herself at the head of a large group of former Brooks students who had all been victimized by CEC.
And I'm like, well, wait a second. Why don't we have any data on these borrowers? And so I put together this very extensive Google form and we got just under 500 borrowers to fill it out. And we were collectively $70 million in debt.
At its height, Brooks had almost 2,000 students enrolled each year. So 500 borrowers is a small fraction of Brooks' total population. Yet, they accounted for $70 million of debt. This survey was the start of a nearly decade-long investigation into Brooks and CEC. She didn't know it yet, but Ashley would soon uncover government corruption and proof of widespread deceptive practices.
All of this leading to the millions of dollars in debt Brooks students were suffocating under. After completing the survey, Ashley took a closer look at the investigation into Brooks from back when she was a student. The one the state did in response to the whistleblower.
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Chapter 6: What was the outcome of the class action lawsuit against CEC?
By this point, it's early 2024. So in early spring, I knew that we were sitting on a substantial amount of evidence. Let's compile all of the evidence that we have from all of these borrowers and stories and start putting them together in a cohesive way and we'll send them to the department.
And we were invited through the Debt Collective's Day of Action in May, and several for-profit borrowers, including myself, were able to land a meeting with the Department of Education. So it was an incredibly hot day in D.C. I walked several blocks with about 40 pounds of paper, and I made this beautiful plopping sound of all of this evidence when it hit the table. And it was pretty amazing.
Ashley left the meeting feeling optimistic. Over the next few months, she got follow-up questions and shared more evidence. But the 2024 election was looming, and there was still no relief for Brooke's students. For Ashley, Kamala Harris was a very appealing option. Back when she was California Attorney General, she actually led an investigation into Corinthian Colleges, a major for-profit chain.
We'll cover that investigation more in the next episode. But Corinthian collapsed in 2015, partly due to that investigation. Harris with her reputation in taking down Corinthian. We were all very much hopeful that she would be put in power, but we're very much aware of the reality of that not happening.
So Ashley and organizers from other schools started arranging meetings with senators to make a push for relief, hopefully before the election.
We have a meeting with Durbin. Can you help us? We have a meeting with Markey. Can you help us? We kept asking everybody, would you lead a congressional letter saying that we deserve to have this loan cancellation? And they're like, we'll sign one, but we can't lead it. And so this is August, September, October. And then November 2024. CNN projects that Donald Trump has been elected president,
As hard as it was to get any of these meetings before the election, as soon as the election happened, we couldn't keep up with the amount of emails and people wanting to meet with us. It was like, OK, we need to protect these borrowers now, which was frustrating because it's like, where were you guys three months ago when we were trying to get your help?
At that point, nobody had even agreed to lead our letter. And finally, Markey said, OK, we're going to lead a letter. There were now just three months left in the Biden administration. Ashley was in a race for relief. In December 2024, she organized a Day of Action in D.C.
We had our press conference and we had 70 other legislators that had signed on to agree that not just Brooks, but all the for-profit bad actors should have their loans canceled and Biden needs to do something and these need to be wiped out before he leaves office. And after the press conference, we took our borrowers and we went to the Department of Education with Bullhorns.
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