March 2014:
Nine months after graduation
THE NEWS THAT VICTORY UNIVERSITY was shutting down hit Isaias hard.
I was working at my desk in the pressroom on the second floor of City Hall in Memphis when my cell phone chimed. Another news reporter, Timberly Moore, had sent me a text message. Hey! Victory is closing and I know that’s where Isaias is supposed to go. Just thought you may want to check on him and possibly write something.
Closing?
I had finished my leave of absence from The Commercial Appeal newspaper, gone back to work, and written a long Sunday article about Isaias. Now people knew about him, and after I was assigned to cover City Hall, even high-ranking government officials sometimes asked how he was doing. Everything looked good: he was living at home, going to Victory University, playing with the band, still dating Magaly and working with his family now and then.
Now this. Reports were all over the local media. The Victory University spokesman seemed just as shocked as everyone else. He said university officials had discussed Victory’s financial struggles the day before but hadn’t talked about closing. The university would shut down at the end of the semester.
I hadn’t spoken with Isaias in weeks. From City Hall, I called his cell phone, and he answered. He and Dennis were buying painting supplies. Had he heard the news? He hadn’t. I told him the little I knew. “Wow,” he said. “That’s incredible. That’s crazy.” He sounded stunned and said he needed to learn more. “It’s a great institution. I like it. I’ll see what I can do to help out.”
The university president, Shirley Robinson Pippins, offered an explanation that day: the university needed more money, and couldn’t find it.1 She elaborated when I spoke with her more than a year later. She said the school faced serious problems with the technology it used to keep track of items such as the payroll system and online courses. Fixing the technology issues and moving the college forward would take more money than the investors could find. “And you know, I think Michael Clifford and his team were working until the very last day to bring that money in,” she said, referring to the school’s owner.
The university’s sudden collapse reflected a nationwide battle between two powerful forces: a profitable, fast-growing industry of corporate universities that relied heavily on federal student loans, and a federal government that fought to curb the industry’s abuses.
Around 2011, the government had eliminated the “safe harbor” provisions under which for-profit university recruiters could earn money based in part on the number of people they convinced to enroll, said Kevin Kinser, the expert on for-profit universities from the University at Albany. Mr. Kinser argued that the rule change led directly to a nationwide slump in enrollment at for-profit universities that would continue for years.
A few days after the Victory University shutdown was announced, I wrote an article that listed the recruiting events that institutions such as LeMoyne-Owen College and Christian Brothers University were offering to Victory University students.2 Then I e-mailed the article to Isaias to make sure he saw it, adding that Jennifer Alejo, the counselor from the Abriendo Puertas group, would like to speak with him.
Isaias wrote back: “Okay. Thank you very much.”
In sending Isaias the article, I was playing a much more active role than I had during my year at Kingsbury, when I had tried to avoid giving the students advice about college. I thought a reporter should document the story, not change it. If I told Isaias or any other student what to do, I would be acting like a sports reporter who tried to advise the quarterback during the game. But now the high school year was over, and I’d already affected Isaias’ life by writing about him in the newspaper, which had prompted some people to give him money and brought his family some new clients. I felt less obligation to stick to my “no advice” rule.
Mario Ramos had seen how going to college had changed his second son. Isaias hadn’t wanted to go, but once he enrolled, he got excited and worked hard. He was happy. Because Isaias received a full scholarship, he would escape the collapse of Victory University with no debt. Still, when the news came that the school would shut down, it hurt him badly.
Mario wondered if he and Cristina had made a mistake by encouraging Isaias to go to college when he didn’t want to. For a while, he felt guilty, but then he decided it wasn’t his fault. Cristina said she and Mario had gone through so many changes and harsh setbacks in life that nothing shocked them. But for Isaias, the shutdown of Victory came as a cruel blow, and it hurt his mother to see him suffer.
One day at the breakfast table at home, Cristina asked Isaias what was wrong. He said he couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep. He didn’t know what he would do. Mario told him to try the other schools, like Christian Brothers or Rhodes, and if that didn’t work, Southwest. And as a last resort, he could go to work with them.
Dennis hugged Isaias at the table. Don’t be afraid. It’s okay. We’ll help you no matter what happens. If no school accepts you, come with us and we’ll go to work. After that, Isaias calmed down and started eating and focusing on school. In mid-April, Isaias was feeling overwhelmed, managing his remaining Victory schoolwork, the applications to other colleges, and practices with Los Psychosis. He said he had spoken with Christian Brothers recruiters. Jennifer Alejo suggested he try Rhodes College, and he was working on an application. Now he was thinking about civil engineering or computer programming rather than business.
“My parents really wanted me to go to college,” he said. “And I guess I understand that. Because it’s really risky to just go out into the family business.” He said he’d keep trying to go to another university.
The shutdown also affected Adriana Garza, the Victory recruiter who had worked with Isaias during his application and delivered the news of the scholarship acceptance to his parents. Ms. Garza told me that on the day of the shutdown, staffers were asked to go to group meetings with the president. Like Isaias, she was stunned to learn the school would close. “We couldn’t believe what she was talking about.” Ms. Garza said she spoke up in the meeting. How are you doing this without telling us? Why didn’t you let us prepare the students? And what will happen to them?
She wanted to stay and help the students figure out their next steps. But the university was laying off its admissions staff immediately. Soon she was told to hand over her keys and business cell phone and leave. The experience left her saddened and disappointed. “You feel like—used.” She lost contact with many students, including Isaias.
The Commercial Appeal newspaper assigned business reporter Jennifer Backer to write follow-up articles on the shutdown. She obtained federal e-mail records that revealed a surprise: at the time Victory University announced its closure, it was facing intense government scrutiny.
It’s unclear exactly when and why the inquiry started, but on February 25, 2014, the U.S. Department of Education told the college president by e-mail that inspectors would come to the Victory University campus on March 24 and stay for four days. The government demanded that Victory hand over records related to every aspect of its financial aid operations. Just nine days after the e-mail, the university announced its shutdown. Education department officials saw the sudden shutdown as suspicious, the e-mail correspondence said.
The investigators came to campus anyway and found several discrepancies, including that students had been charged for courses they weren’t enrolled in.
The school closed in May. Later, a state regulator concluded that Victory had failed to comply with shutdown procedures. The federal government demanded audits to show what Victory had done with the financial aid dollars. The school didn’t provide the audits, which prompted the government to demand that the school pay back money—at first, the government wanted $28.4 million, then later reduced the demand to $8.1 million.3
In late 2015, it was still unclear who, if anyone, would pay back the money, and whether the feds would try hard to recover it. When Jennifer Backer and I spoke on a conference call with the owner, Michael Clifford, he distanced himself from Victory, saying he was a passive investor and hadn’t been involved in the decision to shut down the school. “Every decision was made by the board of trustees,” he said. “I didn’t even know about it until after it happened.”
The last person to serve as chairman of Victory’s board was Beverly C. Robertson, the retired president of the highly regarded National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. She gave a much different account than that given by Mr. Clifford, saying that decisions by him and other investors forced the shutdown of the school.
She said the news of the federal inspection didn’t play a role. Rather, she said Dr. Pippins, the president, realized the school faced a big financial shortfall and that she asked Mr. Clifford and other investors for help.
“But the investors basically came back and said that no, they weren’t going to make any additional investments in the college,” Ms. Robertson said. She said that left the board no choice but to shut down Victory. “I think people were upset with the investors because they realized that children’s futures hung in the balance … I know the students were upset. That’s a given. I can tell you that the staff was crushed. The administration, Dr. Pippins. People were in tears, almost, at the board meeting. It was just a really sad set of circumstances.”
In the conference call with us, Mr. Clifford said he didn’t even know who was on Victory’s board. This surprised me. “Wait, so you’re saying you don’t know who was on the board of Victory University?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I was not on the board and I never went to a board meeting. I had no interaction with the board.”
But he was listed as a board member in the 2009–2010 Victory University catalog. Jennifer Backer found business and personal connections between Mr. Clifford and some board members. When I told Ms. Robertson what he’d said, she laughed. She said Mr. Clifford had, in fact, come to some board meetings.
“Well, I thought I saw him at a board meeting,” she said sarcastically. “I thought he was there. Maybe it was a figment of my imagination.”
The experience at Victory left her questioning the concept of for-profit colleges. If an investor wants to make money, higher education might not be the best way to do it, she said. “Because higher education is costly. You know, even public institutions have a hard time making it.”
My colleague and I contacted Mr. Clifford for comment on what Ms. Robertson had said. He wouldn’t agree to another phone interview and wrote an e-mail repeating much of what he’d said the first time: “My family did our best to help build something very special in Memphis … but we lost a lot causing real hardship for us. And I spoke with you because you sounded honest.” Now he said he was suspicious of us.
Across the United States, more for-profit schools were collapsing. Multiple federal actions forced for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges to begin closing campuses. The company finally declared bankruptcy in April 2015 and closed 28 campuses nationwide on a day’s notice, leaving an estimated 16,000 students struggling through the same shock Isaias and others had experienced.4
The nation’s biggest for-profit university chain, the University of Phoenix, saw its enrollment, profits and stock value plunge as federal pressure continued.
Many people reached out to Isaias after Victory shut down, including Margot Aleman, the Streets Ministries counselor who had led the last-minute intervention at his house. In March, she told me Isaias hadn’t been returning her calls and that she found it a bit hurtful.
Then Isaias stopped returning my calls, too. When his girlfriend Magaly graduated as Kingsbury valedictorian in May 2014, I went to the ceremony, knowing he’d almost certainly be there. But in the crowd, I couldn’t find him.
A few weeks later, Javi Arcega the rock musician sent me an invitation on Facebook to watch Los Psychosis play another show at Murphy’s, the same smoky, dimly lit bar where the band had played on the night before Isaias’ last day of high school.
I hadn’t heard from Isaias in about two months, but when I texted him and Dennis about the show time, he wrote back. Hey Daniel. Sorry I haven’t been able to reply sooner, he began, and gave me the show details. He later said he’d seen my messages but sometimes forgot to answer—he wasn’t trying to push me away.
So that’s how I ended up at a picnic table outside the bar, talking with Isaias and Dennis. It was a Monday night in mid-June 2014, more than a year after Isaias had graduated from high school and more than a month since Victory had shut down. I asked Isaias what was going on.
“Well, since my parents are moving to Mexico—” Isaias began.
Dennis interjected. “We’re trying to convince them not to move.”
Isaias continued. “But the idea right now is that they will. Sometime during the winter.”
On the subject of his own future, he said, “I was thinking I can, but I don’t think it would be pretty if I went right back to school. Having to take Dustin to middle school, Dennis going to work. It just seems like it would be rough. We got a pretty good thing going, Dennis and I together working.”
Isaias told me what he’d been doing since April: dealing with the chaotic shutdown of Victory, confusion over how to get transcripts, long lines at the business office. On the last day of the semester, he had to turn in a take-home final exam for his math class. When Isaias arrived at the building, the security guard, a man he knew, told him students couldn’t go in. Isaias eventually met the instructor outside the building and handed over the exam.
He said Jennifer Alejo had tried to help him. “I guess I never got to use her help.” He said he felt he couldn’t really ask Abriendo Puertas to help him unless he participated in the group’s activities, and he’d never really had time for that.
That night outside Murphy’s, Isaias said work was occupying his mind as the painting business took on more and more projects. Christian Brothers made Isaias an offer of $18,000 in scholarships, but tuition cost about $29,000. Isaias told me he’d completed his application to Rhodes College but wasn’t sure if his professors had turned in their letters of recommendation. He’d never heard from the college. “I guess I could have been keeping up. I didn’t.”
Isaias’ close friend Daniel Nix had exchanged group messages with Isaias around this time, along with Juan Avalos and Ibrahim Elayan. Daniel later said Isaias was concerned about money. “It kind of sucks that he didn’t go … but it’s going to be on his terms. We can’t make him.”
Jennifer Alejo later told me a new college scholarship possibility had developed at Christian Brothers University during the summer, and she wanted Isaias to go for it. Ms. Alejo had called Isaias, texted him, e-mailed, and asked Magaly to relay messages. But Isaias didn’t reply.
Ms. Alejo didn’t know what Isaias was thinking, but she had a guess. You get your hopes up, you go to a school, you finally accept that it can happen. And when that’s stripped from you, it can damage your faith and motivation to try to go anywhere else.
Eventually, Isaias’ silence left the counselor with no choice. She moved on and worked with the students who wanted college more.
That June night at Murphy’s, Isaias said Victory’s closing still bothered him. “It was sad. It would have been nice to go there. College was tough. I enjoyed it. I mean, I don’t mind going. I wouldn’t mind going back.”
Inside the bar, a guitar began to strum and a woman began to sing, country-style.
I thought Isaias was letting his shot at college slip away. I suggested he call Rhodes and ask for the status of his application. I told him I thought I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that—but that it was his life. “Okay,” Isaias said.
Soon he said he’d like to go into the bar. “I don’t want to be an asshole.” It would be rude for him to ignore the show, especially since he’d play later and would appreciate the other band’s support.
Isaias walked inside, where the lead singer, a soul-baring presence on the tiny stage, was giving a far better show than anyone should expect to see at a dive bar on a Monday night. But as Isaias’ own story demonstrated, you find potential everywhere.
Isaias moved toward the music.