 Hello, my people, my name is Meacham. Today, I am your Dean of Death. We're talking about universities that died today. Literally, universities that closed their doors forever. Why should you care about universities that don't exist anymore? Well, simple. I don't want you to choose a university that's not gonna exist in the future. At the end of this video, I'm gonna explain to you some things you can look for so that you can choose a university that will actually survive for the whole time that you're there so that you don't get left stranded like the thousands of students that we're gonna talk about today. So let's get started with Argosy University. I need a university that will fit my hectic schedule. Let me work on my degree and work at my job. On the surface, everything seemed on the up and up with Argosy University. They were offering degrees in a variety of fields. Students were going there. Everything seemed great. Behind the scenes, though, they had serious financial issues. They were receiving a lot of money from the federal government to give to students in the form of Pell grants and student loans. Instead of using that money for the students, though, they were using it to pay for bills at the university, and that is not allowed. This is the Argosy University website. It says, Phoenix is no longer accepting new students. As for its current students, well, they found out Wednesday that their school is closing tomorrow. In 2019, the federal government actually raided Argosy University's files and found evidence of this fraud and shut them off from federal funding completely. That meant that their biggest source of free money was gone, and so they decided to close their doors the very next day. Overnight, thousands of students in Chicago had to run to the university's office to get their transcripts and get all their documents because they said they would never deal with them ever again. The business was closed. You're gonna see a few other universities like Argosy on this list today, but let's go to a more interesting case, Trump University. This one kind of technically was never a university. It's just an organization that used the word university to establish itself as something credible. A lot like the propaganda machine PragerU. Seriously, don't ever watch PragerU. Trump University sold classes, single classes, for as much as $35,000. At Trump University, we teach success. That's what it's all about. Success, it's going to happen to you. Trump University only lasted for about six years before it closed and then a bunch of lawsuits came. Trump settled most of those lawsuits when he was on his way to becoming president in 2016 for about $25 million out of court just to make everyone shut up. Something else that Trump is very, very good at. While we're on the topic of not quite technically universities, let's talk about what happened to Drama Center London. Drama Center London, or DCL, was part of Central St. Martin's College and it was a very successful program for the college so why did it close? A student died. I told you I was the dean of death today. Now, DCL had a long history of complaints. Everything from unsafe working conditions for teachers to somewhat dangerous spaces for students, strangely shared dressing rooms that made some people uncomfortable and a lot of reports of bullying from both students and staff. Now, the DCL people just said this is part of acting culture and it's about toughening up their actors and it seems that at DCL they were taking things a little too far. However, the word failure really is not relevant here because our view is if you fail, well, next time fail better. One of the students tragically committed suicide after a trip to Moscow where other students from DCL were bullying him nonstop and not letting him sleep. The student, it should be mentioned, was a minority and there's kind of a history of reports of racism at this college that led to them deciding to shut down DCL completely. No more drama in Central St. Martin College. Every time you skipped school like you pretended to be sick so that you could stay home, you had to sit at home and watch TV and the only thing on TV in the morning was The Price is Right, amazing show and during The Price is Right, you would see tons of commercials for ITT Tech. We are educators helping people build a foundation for the rest of their lives. ITT Technical Institute, Education for the Future. To find out more, call 1-800-ITT-TECH or visit us on the web. I remember them so well. ITT Tech offered degrees for a number of high paying jobs and so on the surface, you would think this is a great place to study. I mean, they're going to give you a career that will make a lot of money in the future and it seems pretty easy to get in and get started. So what's the catch? The real goal of ITT Tech was to get you into serious insurmountable debt. ITT Tech would partner with very high interest lenders and then push students to accept those loans even when cheaper federal loans were available. They specifically targeted minorities in low income areas with the goal of exploiting them with these high interest loans. It got so bad that only about one in three people from ITT Tech ever actually paid off their loans. I mean, that's half of the national average. They literally called their clients the educational have nots. We're talking about people who maybe didn't go to college right after high school and they needed to get a degree later in life. These people were desperate to improve their situation in life and ITT Tech took advantage of their desperation. But it worked. They had at one point over 130 campuses in 38 states in the US. They were the largest for-profit college system in the country by far. So what went wrong? Why did ITT Tech, this juggernaut, fail? ITT Tech was cooking the books for a long time to make it seem like they were using federal money responsibly. In fact, they would even fake students' grades to make them look better to justify getting more money from the federal government. And just like as we talked about with Argosy, eventually the federal government came in, raided ITT Tech, found evidence of their wrongdoing and cut them off from federal funding. And once you get cut off from federal funding, you are pretty much dead in the water as a university. ITT Tech closed its doors in 2016 and left 40,000 students stranded without a degree. A lot like ITT Tech, Corinthian colleges also exploited poor people relentlessly in order to get as much enrollment as possible. Making money, which is something I wasn't doing a year ago. It really made me feel like I'd become somebody and I'd become an adult. I was so proud of myself. It's the first time I was really proud of myself. We are Everest, Heald, and Wiotech. We are Corinthian colleges. They were even more explicit about the way they targeted poor people. Here's how they describe their target demographic. Someone who was isolated, impatient, individual with low self-esteem, who has few people in their life who care about them and who's stuck and unable to see or plan for the future. Corinthian colleges would put ads on shows like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich. I mean, guys, if this- It was just very stressful. I mean, we're trying to take care of a kid and make it seem like none of that was happening. We have potential to be worth more. Comes after this. Oh, you see why he cheated? You probably shouldn't study there. Interestingly though, Canada came to the rescue in this one because Corinthian colleges had campuses in both Canada and the United States and Ontario was actually the first government to revoke their operating license. And when that happened, it scared all of the people in the United States as well and Corinthian colleges realized the jig is up. It's time to get out while the getting is good. They closed their doors forever. Lincoln College, the college named after Abraham Lincoln located in the town of Lincoln, Illinois. Great consistency there, guys. It's actually a really sad story. This university was founded right up to the Civil War in 1865. So you would think that they're going to stand the test of time. Even though they only usually had about 1,000 students, 2019 was actually their best year ever. They had almost 1,200 students enrolled. Everything was looking great for Lincoln College. They were like entering a new era of prosperity. So what happened? COVID happened and then more things happened and those things were bad. COVID came around and obviously it affected all universities but it also affected the smaller ones a little bit more since they don't quite have as much money to work with to survive in those situations. Still though, Lincoln College made it work. They kept their classes going and just when they thought the light at the end of the tunnel was there, it was time to find success again, they got hacked. For some reason, somebody hacked the admissions system of Lincoln College late into the admissions cycle for the 2021 year and they lost all of the data of all of their applicants and they couldn't figure out what to do after that. The hack on Lincoln College was the final nail in the coffin for this university. They lost all the data for all of their applicants in 2021 and then they weren't able to get in touch with those people. So those people ended up applying and enrolling to other universities. By the time they had their system fixed, there were no more students left. Facing a basically empty class of 2021 and still reeling from the 2020 pandemic, Lincoln College had to close. It's sad because this is a university that historically had a lot of black and minority and low income and first generation students, they were very affordable and provided a quality education. It goes to show that even good universities can die but some universities just died because they can't change with the times and that's the case with Concordia University. They lost two campuses in the last two years, one in Oregon and one in New York. But this university is run by the Lutheran church and so they have a lot of funding from the church to support their operations in different places. Of course, being run by a church means that they tend to have conservative Christian values and while that might be appealing for some people, it wasn't exactly good for an environment like Portland, Oregon, which is known for its liberal tendencies. I have a question about the chicken if you could just tell us a little bit more about it. The chicken is a heritage breed. It looks like a happy little guy runs around. A lot of friends, other chickens as friends, putting his little wing around another one. The Concordia campus in Portland, Oregon started to have some problems with a student group that represented LGBT people and the church said that there cannot be such a group on a Concordia campus. Before long, support for the university started to disappear in that area. The same kind of thing was happening in New York too where, again, people tend to be more progressive and liberal so enrollment in those campuses began to decline and Concordia ended up closing them completely. However, they still do operate seven campuses in the United States. If you want me to check out Concordia University, leave a comment below because I literally can be there really fast. My mom lives kind of right around the corner in Michigan so I could go check out their Ann Arbor campus and tell you more about Concordia if that's your thing. What can you do to avoid attending a university that dies? First of all, you should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, or ever attend a for-profit college. Many of the universities that were on this list today are for-profit institutions or were for-profit institutions. Places like Corinthian College, ITT Tech, all of these are for-profit institutions which means that they don't really care about you. They care about money. In fact, some of them were publicly traded on stock exchanges. The thing with for-profit colleges is even if they do their jobs correctly, they may just disappear at any moment because they're not really under any obligation to help you finish your degree. If anyone ever recommends a for-profit college to you, you need to tell them to get the hell out of here. But another thing you can do is keep an eye on the size of the university, its enrollment statistics, and their endowment. The size of the university matters. Keep track of that number. You can see every year how many people have enrolled in a university, and if you notice that that number is on the decline and it's getting below like 1,000 students, you might want to stop and reconsider. There are really good small colleges that maintain small populations, places like Beloit College, for example, or Hillsdale College, and these places are capable of handling a bad year because they've saved a lot of money in their endowment, and that is another thing you should take a look at. Endowments are basically giant savings accounts where universities can invest money, make it grow, stonks, things of that nature. Those endowments though are used to help fund the university's programs, unlike federal funding, which has to go directly to students. A university that's well endowed will probably be able to survive even in bad times. So if you are looking for good universities, make sure that you pick non-profit universities, make sure that you pick ones that show signs of staying stable, ones that are growing or at least maintaining their populations, and look for ones that have enough money to cover a rainy day so that if we get a monkeypox pandemic in a year or two, you're not gonna be worried about finishing your degree because your university won't be dead. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next week.