The purpose of this petition is to appeal to the U.S. Department of Education to discharge the student loans to students who have attended Argosy University (a for-profit school) with campuses across the country. The school and the staff at Argosy misrepresented the success of their programs while planning their closure and taking our money.  We seeked to better ourselves and Argosy University seeked to better thier finances.

An article from April 9th, 2018, states, "In two separate letters sent over the past week, Democratic U.S. senators are demanding government investigations of a wave of troubling conversions of bad-acting for-profit colleges into non-profit educational institutions (https://www.republicreport.org/2018/senators-demand-probes-of-for-profit-college-shifts-to-non-profit/  Argosy earned its money by ripping off students and taxpayers alike, while avoiding both taxation and the Department of Education rules designed to protect against abuses in the for-profit college industry. 

Quinlan (2018) notes, "For-profit colleges want to convert for a few reasons. These colleges get to skirt the kind of regulatory scrutiny they normally receive while continuing to operate in a similar manner, and they could also escape the poor reputation of the for-profit college industry. For-profit colleges are often associated with scamming and manipulating students by misrepresenting a graduate’s success, providing laughably poor instruction and training, and encouraging students to take out a lot of private loans (https://thinkprogress.org/senate-democrats-nonprofit-colleges-1baf88c9c028/  

In 2015, Robert Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who focuses on education policy states, “Being a nonprofit is usually a lot harder than being a for-profit because you have to be accountable to trustees who do not have a financial interest, so you’re not paying trustees with stock prices. So they’re not getting excited about ways to take advantage of consumers. They get excited about ways to help students" (https://thinkprogress.org/senate-democrats-nonprofit-colleges-1baf88c9c028/  

By signing this petition on behalf of the students of Argosy University we demand that all loans be adjudicated.  We demand that justice is served to stop this practice from impacting the lives of others.  Thousands of students have spent many committed years only to be left without a degree.  Someone needs to be held accountable.