High-pressure recruiting helped speed Decker College downfall

LOUISVILLE, Ky. --Before Decker College came under new owners in 2003, its enrollment stood at just under 200 students.

The new owners, Jeff and Gerald Woodcox and an investment firm featuring former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, put a new recruiting practice in place -- an aggressive marketing strategy focusing on using ads on the Internet offering an opportunity to win prizes or money, followed by callbacks from recruiters in a central call-center in Louisville.

The strategy worked, boosting the for-profit trade school's enrollment to more than 3,700 in less than two years and allowing the school to bring in millions of dollars in federal student loan money.

But, former employees, ex-students and court records say, the recruiting strategy took shortcuts, employed questionable techniques and helped lead Decker College into a downward spiral that now has state and federal authorities investigating allegations of student loan fraud.

Weld, who served as Decker's CEO for much of 2005 before leaving to work on his New York gubernatorial campaign, said his only role in recruiting students was making one speech at a Georgia high school.

"I did not have any involvement in recruiting students," Weld said in an e-mail.

Using the Internet to recruit students isn't unique to Decker. Many colleges and universities have Web pages and some for-profit schools, such as Sullivan University in Louisville, use pop-up ads to attract students.

Sean Gallagher, a senior analyst for Eduventures, a Boston-based higher education consulting firm, said colleges and universities spent about $2.5 billion on advertising in 2005, with a significant amount put toward online ads.

"The 'net has jumped to a pretty prominent position as opposed to traditional guidebooks," Gallagher said.

But, Gallagher said, federal guidelines forbid offering most incentives to potential students and lay out specific rules as to what is and isn't acceptable. Some of what Decker's recruiters described pushes the envelope, Gallagher said.

Stephanie French, director of public relations for Sullivan University, said students replying to Internet ads are sent a course catalogue and offered opportunities to visit the campus before there is any discussion of enrolling or student loans.

"We don't want to lure them with some crazy thing on the Web," French said. "We really work at getting people to come and see what we're about."

Dale Michael Brown of Kansas City, Mo., enrolled in Decker College online without ever seeing the campus.

Brown said he signed up through a pop-up ad on the Internet and received a call from a recruiter a short time later asking about his interest in electrical work and offering to help him get a student loan.

There were few questions asked, just a rush to get him enrolled and signed up for $8,000 in student loans in less than 24 hours, Brown said.

Former Decker recruiters Donna Noe and Vivian Kaiser said Brown's experience wasn't unique. Potential students were rushed through the process, Noe and Kaiser said, because recruiters had a quota of getting between three and five students signed up every week.

"It was high-pressure telemarketing is what it was," said Noe, who worked in the call center in the summer of 2005.

"It was pressure, pressure, pressure these poor people" said Vivian Kaiser, another former Decker recruiter who worked during the final months of the school.

Meeting the quota was made tougher, though, because the leads generated by the Internet adds were mostly useless because people wanting to qualify for the prizes would fill in bogus information while others would take the survey just to get rid of the ad, Kaiser said.

"You'd get grandmothers, people trying to win a set of golf clubs, whatever," Kaiser said. "It was just a joke."

Ralph Anderson, an electronics instructor at Decker's Atlanta campus, said many of the students he saw had limited educational backgrounds and little interest in the course work.

"We had a number of students fresh out of prison," Anderson said. "There were times when I think they were pulling homeless people in."

The recruiting process got the attention of inspectors from the Council on Occupational Education, the group that accredited Decker College.

A three-person team of inspectors who toured the school in June 2005 and issued a written report detailing what they found to be Decker College's disturbing recruiting practices.

"No attempt is made to validate high school diplomas or equivalency," the report says. "It is the opinion of the team that the institution is in such a hurry to enroll students that they are not making a good faith effort to ensure the students are qualified for the AAS program and that the student can learn the material."

Those onsite inspections eventually led the U.S. Department of Education to stop subsidizing student loans for Decker after accreditors said many of the courses were online, something the Department of Education said it didn't approve.

The FBI and the U.S. Department of Education are investigating Decker for possible violations of federal law, including conspiracy to commit fraud, wire fraud, financial aid fraud and giving false statements to the federal government.

The U.S. Department of Education said Decker owes $7.2 million.

Multiple attempts to reach Jeff Woodcox via phone and U.S. mail have been unsuccessful. The phone number listed for Woodcox in federal court is no longer in service. He did not respond to letters sent to his last known addresses.