Online Education Fraud: The Diary of a Short Seller

In the mid-to-late 1990’s, the Department of Education had serious concerns about one of the country’s largest for-profit schools, Computer Learning Centers (CLC). With over two dozen locations nationwide, CLC had grown rapidly through its use of federal loan money. In early 1998, the Illinois Attorney General filed a fraud lawsuit against CLC, which prompted a “program review” by the Department of Education of the company’s main campus and several branch schools in the Washington, DC area....