For-profit college, without the pesky college part
April 14, 2017 9:44 AM   Subscribe

Forest Trail was something new: a program branded as a university and that offered athletics but no teachers, libraries or curriculum of its own. Athletes would pay to play sports year-round and live on campus.
What could go wrong? Spoiler alert: lots.
posted by kevinbelt (29 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
Forest Trail was something new: Gifty Chung, a Ghana-born education entrepreneur, was launching a program that she branded as a university and that offered athletics but no teachers, libraries or curriculum of its own.

One thing I have learned: when the word "education" gets put next to the word "entrepreneur" the likelihood that something good will come out of it is non-zero, but not by much.
posted by soren_lorensen at 10:17 AM on April 14, 2017 [51 favorites]


Holy shit, what parents went along with this? I don't blame the parents, this was a criminal scam, but what parent looks at this program and thinks it's good for kid in any way, shape or form? What a nightmare.
posted by GuyZero at 10:23 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


I had that thought too, but there are a lot of delusional sports parents out there.
posted by kevinbelt at 10:24 AM on April 14, 2017


Not much difference than a handful of the tiny private high schools that somehow turn into basketball academies when they hire a coach to ramp up the program.. (or ones that don't even have a school, they just travel to tournaments and practice at the park gym)
posted by k5.user at 10:26 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


Well, and a lot of parents who did not go to college themselves and don't have much to compare it to.
posted by soren_lorensen at 10:26 AM on April 14, 2017 [16 favorites]


but what parent looks at this program and thinks it's good for kid in any way, shape or form?

Probably the same parents who have been screaming at their kids from the sidelines since they were old enough to put a ball on a tee and swing at it, or kick a soccer ball without whiffing.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 10:31 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


It also sounds like Gifty Chung was charismatic and convincing. If you were a parent who didn't have a strong sense of how college was supposed to work and you were played by a skilled confidence woman, you might very well sign up.

My parents both went to college, and even so, there were a lot of things they didn't understand about college when I was applying. Nothing terrible happened and I have a good degree, but there were a lot of things that peers with professional-class parents knew about and were able to do that my family and I did not.
posted by Frowner at 10:35 AM on April 14, 2017 [8 favorites]


"a lot of parents who did not go to college themselves and don't have much to compare it to"

I think there's even more to it than that. There's also an ignorance of the sports industry. There aren't many examples of who were not recruited to play a sport in college who end up having a remunerative career in that sport (and in fact, almost none of the people who were recruited end up playing professionally). Some of the sports mentioned (e.g. track) aren't even revenue sports at the college level, let alone having the potential for a professional future except for a tiny percentage of Olympic-level talent. So these families are going to end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, with no athletic prospects, and no college degree. The kids would be screwed even if this institution were legit. That it turned out to be a scam is just cruel.
posted by kevinbelt at 10:43 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


"Then Greg came through with his offer from Forest Trail. I did some research on the internet, and it looked like a really legit website. I knew my boy would be taken care of."

Oh boy. /sigh
posted by NoMich at 10:44 AM on April 14, 2017 [7 favorites]


My parents both went to college, and even so, there were a lot of things they didn't understand about college when I was applying

Yeah. As a rule, scams play on the vulnerable - and when it comes to college scams, that is generally going to be families that don't know much about college.

And actually, what this reminds me of is the current employment crisis facing law students at lower-quality (and often scammy) schools. Parents want their kids to be successful, and they hear that their kids will be successful if they do X, Y, Z - but only the savvy parents really have the ability to dig into the truth behind these cultural narratives. I don't see that much of a difference between an unrealistic expecation that your child will become a successful lawyer by going to X scammy school, and expecting that your child will become a successful track star by going to Y scammy school.

True, they probably have slightly more chance of making money as a lawyer than as a track star, but it's degree and not kind. People who are vulnerable due to lack of complicated instituational knowledge get blamed for being taken in...
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:54 AM on April 14, 2017 [7 favorites]


The Kernersville police took a closer look at Forest Trail after Tucker, the detective, met with Gifty Chung and Rudd, as did the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations. They probed for financial aid fraud, but both agencies determined that because FTSU did not receive financial aid directly from a government agency, the issues between the business and its athletes were a civil matter -- that is, a private dispute over promised services -- rather than a criminal one. Which means the more financial burden a university can persuade students and their families to carry, the less liable it is for fraud.

If the North Carolina AG's office decided to take an interest, it could certainly pursue a consumer-fraud case. You don't go to jail, but you can find yourself paying treble damages.
posted by praemunire at 11:12 AM on April 14, 2017


If the North Carolina AG's office decided to take an interest, it could certainly pursue a consumer-fraud case. You don't go to jail, but you can find yourself paying treble damages.

This seems crazy to me - the school was unaccredited right? That seems like a clear case of fraud or misrepresentation.

From TFA: The North Carolina board of governors stopped Forest Trail from offering college classes without a license but didn't take any further action -- which means the less education a so-called university offers, the less it can be regulated as a school.

What a dereliction of duty here - it claims to be a school but since it offers no classes, there's nothing they can do? That seems like laziness and/or garbage.
posted by GuyZero at 11:22 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


My parents both went to college, and even so, there were a lot of things they didn't understand about college when I was applying.

I think that was pretty common back in the day, especially for people whose parents were the first in their families to go to college. Previous to about the 90's, a college degree really was something special, and did open doors. And I think for-profit scam schools were rarer. So even parents who were first-generation college graduates without a savvy network didn't have all the things to beware of that they do now.

And same with the low tier, scammy (though technically accredited and nonprofit) law schools Kutsuwamushi mentioned. A lot of parents think "law school = successful child" and don't realize the glut of lawyers on the market and that there are, even accredited, law schools that are a colossal waste of money.

I don't know what to do about schools that are accredited and nonprofit but still are a rip-off like the low tier law schools, but I wish that scam schools could be shut down like Corinthian was.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 11:26 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


When I read that Gifty Chung "has a Ph.D. in education and educational leadership from the for-profit online University of Phoenix" I knew there was trouble ahead.

Some states are different, but in mine you have to take two grad classes every five years to keep your public school teacher certification. You can take two real classes at the local real college, and learn real stuff, but they cost real money, and a teacher's salary doesn't go too far. So some of us have taken cheaper classes at the University of Phoenix, where you don't really have to do any work. I'm not surprised Chung didn't even realize she had to get accreditation for the school she was starting. U. of P. offers something far far less than a rigorous education.

When we drive by their building, I joke about the warm feelings I have for my alma mater.
posted by kozad at 11:57 AM on April 14, 2017 [7 favorites]


My dad is a university professor and did not understand some key things about my own college decision-making experience. Parents who never went to college themselves and who don't know many people who went to college? Man, they don't even have a chance up against a con like this.
posted by soren_lorensen at 12:02 PM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


I don't know if it was ever thus or if it is the frog brought to a boil slowly but every time I think I am cynical I find I'm not enough. Navient has been in the news lately and the past 10 years seem to have generated a litany of news about scam/education plays that often seem to boil down to pursuing the public purse, (if not actual cash than implicit guarantees.) The primary "core competency" that online for profit charter school companies list in their prospectus is not education but facility with lobbying and manipulating state legislatures. Le Cordon Who's Got Your Money Now Sucker and their ilk seem to regularly make the news with allegations of high pressure sales lying and borderline or actual fraud. What I want to understand is why it seems like we are overrun by weasels. It is as though everybody who had any kind of moral compass took other jobs, abandoning the field of "business" to straight up borderline personalities or the cowardly fear driven "I'd love too but" types. (I'd love to pay a living wage but we just simply can't justify that to our stockholders, etc.)
posted by Pembquist at 12:03 PM on April 14, 2017


I remember when this idea was being promoted over the summer. I grew up near Barber-Scotia and was really sorry to hear that they had gotten to the point of renting out space to this obvious scam. Such a sad mess all around.

I teach at an NAIA school, and we are certainly a refuge for kids who aren't quite good enough for Div I. We give good scholarships for athletes, but the school is inexpensive anyway, like many non-flagship state schools, and most of our non-athlete students are able to get by with just federal financial aid and then have time to focus on school and life. As a high school athlete myself, I respect that it's hard to admit that your sports career is over, but I wish that we could find a better way to help folks begin to transition to life after sports, to sports for fun, to what they will do for the rest of their lives, to being honest that hardly anyone becomes a professional athlete, and you don't need sports to pay for education.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:47 PM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


What are the kids still playing baseball together expecting to get out of it?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 4:00 PM on April 14, 2017


To me that seems like the most normal part of the whole story. If there's a good coach, the team has a good chemistry and they are chalking up wins then they're basically a senior travel team. There are lots of 18/91u tournament teams out there. And I think there are 18+ amateur tournaments too. So it's quite possible these kids have a competitive team which is great, but it's not an education.
posted by GuyZero at 4:29 PM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


I don't know what a senior travel team is normally like, but I didn't think it involved a full-time dorm situation. Specifically, when they end with "there's still hope", what are they hoping for? That they get into a real college this year so they can play college baseball, or that they could go straight to minor league teams from this group, or ????
posted by the agents of KAOS at 4:49 PM on April 14, 2017


The longer I work in higher ed, the more clear it becomes to me that a lot of the purpose of American college is social, rather than academic. It's a chance to try out adulthood with training wheels before you have to do the real thing. It goes without saying that a lot of students don't have the luxury of treating it that way, because they have actual adult responsibilities, but that's the appeal for a big chunk of the traditionally-aged student body. And it occurs to me that there aren't a whole lot of opportunities to do adulthood with training wheels if you're not interested in academics. The other main big one is the military, but that has some significant drawbacks for some people: loss of freedom and fundamental rights; potential obligation to put self in harm's way and/or kill other people. I wonder if part of the appeal of this scam was that it was a chance to live in a dorm with other people your age even if you didn't want to take (or couldn't hack) freshman comp or college algebra. And I actually can see how that would be appealing both to participants and to their parents.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:01 PM on April 14, 2017 [9 favorites]


" The 6-foot-5 lefty starter had come to FTSU looking for another shot at impressing scouts but was rebuked for trying to eat more than a single Pop-Tart for breakfast; "

Wow. I went to a Division I school that was competitive in everything from football to fencing, and one of the foremost quirks of the scholarship athletes was that their (school-funded) meal plan was twice as large as everyone else's, to allow for the 5,000 calories per day they needed in training season. Even the gymnasts, who never ate up to their allotment. But one of the foundational conditions of the scholarship was that they got HELLA FOOD to support their intense training regimens.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:27 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


Their website wasn't anything to write home about, but if you weren't super savvy about such things, it looks very much like what one would have expected from a college, and I think most people are a long way from understanding how easy it is to set up a site like that for a scam. I don't think there was any way this was possibly going to work out, but I don't know how we can expect ordinary members of the population to just know this. I definitely knew a number of people who went off to little private out-of-state universities in the late 90s based on shiny brochures and good financial aid offers, in several cases without having visited first because we were all poor. Those were all totally legitimate colleges, thankfully, but we really had very little way of telling the difference.
posted by Sequence at 8:58 PM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


I would like to learn more about this piano-as-sport that's listed in the admissions form.
posted by aniola at 10:58 PM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


Not much difference than a handful of the tiny private high schools that somehow turn into basketball academies when they hire a coach to ramp up the program.. (or ones that don't even have a school, they just travel to tournaments and practice at the park gym)

Postgraduate prep school is a perfectly respectable scam, goddammit. It's got history and tradition and the marks pay cash up front!
posted by Snarl Furillo at 3:36 AM on April 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


> I would like to learn more about this piano-as-sport that's listed in the admissions form.

Piano toss.
posted by oheso at 6:15 AM on April 15, 2017


You know, if you just stuck an r between the g and i of Gifty Chung's first name, it would better match her character (at least as represented in the article).
posted by oozy rat in a sanitary zoo at 9:56 AM on April 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


Gifty Chung? Dr. Gifty Chung if you go by her LinkedIn profile. Tom Robbins couldn't have given her a better name.

Man, that article was grim. But, hey, there's some good news at the end. The baseball team stuck together and won a doubleheader. Meanwhile:

...the for-profit education industry could be primed for a new boom. On March 6, President Donald Trump's administration began loosening federal regulations on for-profit colleges, allowing them to delay reporting whether graduates are able to repay their loans.
posted by bunbury at 7:16 PM on April 15, 2017


Peep Gifty Chung's philosophy of education. (Spoiler: buzzwords)
posted by dhens at 8:57 PM on April 16, 2017


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