Westwood Class Action Featured in Newsweek

Newsweek.com, one of the country’s leading sources of news coverage, featured a story about the high-interest loans leveraged on unsuspecting students by colleges like Westwood.

College Students Hit by High-Interest Loans, by David Graham, www.Newsweek.com

The class action suit was featured, along with the story of Tyrone Bailey, a Westwood graduate who was unable to use his degree to get job in his field and is now saddled with thousands of dollars of debt for a largely worthless degree.

“Graduation day should have been a happy one for Tyrone Bailey. The first in his family of three children to earn anything beyond a high-school diploma, Bailey, 24, received a bachelor’s in criminal studies from Westwood College in Torrance, Calif., two years ago. But even while the day’s pomp and circumstance played out, his thoughts turned quickly to the tough job market and the $20,000 in loans he borrowed directly from his alma mater that were set to accrue a whopping 18 percent interest rate.”

“Bailey says that process wasn’t strong enough, and he says the interest-rate reduction doesn’t cut it, either. “Here I am stuck with [$20,000] of debt and a degree that’s useless,” says Bailey, who is now working a near-minimum wage job at the Long Beach sanitation department while he works toward a master’s degree online via the University of Phoenix. He says he couldn’t get a job that would pay his loans, so he entered a new degree program in order to defer loan payments. According to Bailey, no traditional school was willing to accept his Westwood credits. That’s common practice—most traditional nonprofit schools rarely accept transfer credits from for-profit institutions because of differences in the accreditation process. “I’m asking for my loans to be forgiven and for them to pay for education at a traditional school; I still want an education so I can start a career.”"

The article also features a former employee of Westwood College who exposes the truth behind the deception.  Ms. Morris said what so many former employees have told us so far – that Westwood knew exactly what it was doing when it lured students into the high-interest loans for massive amounts of debt.

“But the school wasn’t always so empathetic, according to Inez Morris, who was student-aid director at a Westwood campus near Atlanta for a year before being fired in 2006. She told NEWSWEEK that aid officers were instructed not to explain the full cost of a Westwood degree nor the terms of the loans. “I don’t think [students] understood the interest rates, I don’t think they understood that it was not a federal loan, or they didn’t understand what they were signing,” says Morris, who is working with the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the class-action suit against Westwood. Often, she says, the loans were originated to close balances for students who had dropped out but had not paid for the time they spent at the school. She also adds that students discovered they had high-interest loans only when notified by a letter after leaving school.”

Check out the article and post your comments letting them know what you think about these loans, what you were told, and what it has meant to your life since leaving Westwood.  Your voices are being heard, so it’s important to keep speaking up where ever possible!

Best,

Jillian