Ashley’s 20 Years of Brooks

Tenacity & Spite Anniversary post – 9/5/2022

Twenty years ago today I walked onto the Brooks Institute of Photography campus to start my first class. I had grown up in a mobile home park to a single mother who spent my high school years battling cancer. Growing up in the 80s/90s I was constantly told the only way you will be valuable in society is with a college degree. My mom was the first in her family to start college but dropped out to marry my father. She put a lot of pressure on me to not make her same mistake. It was college at all costs. I was told I would never amount to anything without it. Due to my mom’s illness, financial situation, and my unmedicated ADHD I didn’t get the best grades. I barely graduated high school. What I did have, however, was a camera.

We might have been short on cash, but every birthday and Christmas I would get a box of film and a National Geographic subscription. The Easter bunny delivered a Cabbage Patch 110 film camera to me the year I turned 7. I have had a camera in my hand since. When most kids played house, I played portrait studio. Using sheets and lamps and bribing my sisters and neighbors to model for me.

I started working at the mall studio while in high school. I ended up going to my community college and working my way up to employment at the best portrait studio in town. My community college classes were early education focused, my mom wanted me to be a teacher, but I knew my heart wasn’t in it. By graduation, I knew I wanted to pursue photography full-time as a photojournalist. I had already been working as a portrait photographer for 5 years at this point. I wanted to tell stories and change the world for the better through creating images.

I was flipping through a photography magazine during my lunch break at work and found an ad for Brooks Institute of Photography at their beautiful campus in Santa Barbara. I called just to get some initial information. By the end of the day, I had two voicemails and an email from them asking to interview me to see if I was a good candidate for the school.

My recruiter, Tim Scott, was very eager for me to tell him all about my life, my hardships, my not-so-great relationship with both my boyfriend and mother and my wanting to escape my hometown. The dreams of traveling the world and doing photography. He was going to help change my whole world. I would go from rags to riches, but it was important for me to enroll as soon as possible so I would not miss this opportunity. Not completely convinced I could pay for it in the many many phone calls between Tim and me, I made the five-hour drive down to the palm tree studded campus near the ocean and sat across his desk. He pulled out several sheets of paper showing me that the school has a 90% employment rate. Everyone who has come through these doors is successful in their craft. I would be “guaranteed” jobs and a salary that would allow us to pay off our loans in a year or two “at most”. I was told that graduates often leave to work for National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, and Vogue. We were pressured to enroll immediately or lose our spot. I signed the papers.

They pushed financial aid by interchanging the words scholarship, awards, grants, and loans. The information was intentionally misleading. I was told I would qualify for grants, but after my enrollment was signed I was told I needed to take on private loans instead which my mom would need to cosign for or I couldn’t start.

Now let’s step back a second. This was 2002. I was still using AOL dial-up for very basic internet. Texting was brand new and too expensive to use. There wasn’t really a place to go looking for controversy or reviews. I assumed this was a school and they would have my best interest at heart. Like why wouldn’t they? Everyone told me that college was always the gateway to success. These people believed in me, they wanted me to succeed. They were a school. I was taught to trust schools.

On my very first day, I arrived early to get the lay of the land. It was a small campus, formally an elementary school, but I didn’t know anyone yet. I made a beeline to Tim’s office only to find him frantically packing a box. I asked him what was going on. He turns to me and says, “Listen, these guys are a bunch of cons. I’m sorry, I told you it was a good school. It’s worthless. I would see what you can do to get out of it.” and then he walked out the door. I started to panic. I had just moved my whole life. I was changing my life. I asked the woman in the next office and she said he was just upset that he was laid off and that she worked in financial aid and if there was anything I needed to just come to see her. She was the one that made dreams come true. I brushed it off and dove in head first.

My photography classes were nothing short of amazing. I was lucky to work with some top of the industry instructors that became lifelong mentors throughout my life. The general education classes were a show-up and you will be passed, situation. Unknowing the accreditation they used would mean none of the classes would transfer to a state school or the like, the education value was lacking. They conveniently left that out of the sale pitch and only realized it when I tried to go back to school years after leaving. I didn’t know there was a difference.

It wasn’t until a year later when a ‘disgruntled employee’ aka whistleblower started making waves did I even realize the school was owned by the huge corporation Career Education Corporation [CEC] the history of the school was always about the Brooks Family Legacy. I was busy with becoming a rising star in my classes and my new boyfriend, Rich Pizzuti, to pay too much attention to it. For the first time in my life, I was thriving.

In 2005, the year we graduated, the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education of California did an undercover investigation and told Brooks to stop enrolling students and were on notice to be potentially shut down. CEC fought the allegations and the case was thrown out on a small technicality.

My speculation was how well CEC’s stocks were doing at the time paired with Senator Diane Feinstein’s husband being the majority owner of CEC, sitting on the board of directors, and the Senator being an investor herself. I don’t have the smoking gun [yet] but my money is on that. BPPE was gutted shortly after and the investigation was never reopened.

Newspaper jobs were almost non-existent or they paid very little. The school’s amazing career placement was nothing more than the weekly local craigslist ads to places like Starbucks/Safeway and unpaid internships. Turns out any employment was what they meant in their employment rates.

We moved in with Rich’s mother in his hometown of Leominster, MA 3000 miles away from Brooks. I went to work in a mall portrait studio, the same minimum wage job I held in high school, and took on every freelance gig that I came across. We both scrambled to find steady work in what was the beginning of the housing market crash.

Then our loans came due, we were shocked to find them to be thousands of dollars a month, we could not afford them. We tried to work with our servicers and they would just recommend putting them in forbearance, they did not explain that they would raise the interest and they would compound daily. Before we knew it our total was topping HALF A MILLION DOLLARS.

In 2008 there was a class action against my school for fraudulently misleading borrowers on income, graduation, and job rates. The settlement we received of a whole $1200 wasn’t enough to cover one month’s payment. Unless you wrote in to ‘opt out’ of the class action, you were considered a class member. Thinking it would be a way of eliminating at least some of the debt, most signed on. It also made it impossible to sue CEC again. The majority of the settlement went to the lawyers.

Trying to keep our single retirement-aged cosigning moms from financial destruction, we threw everything we had at these loans. For several years it was 75% of our income, and only able to make the minimum payments our loans continued to grow instead of shrink.

Though the little photography business we have grown to be sustainable, we were smart with our budgeting and have relatively good credit, we still cannot get credit cards or car loans without super high-interest rates. When it comes to big loans like buying a home, good credit doesn’t matter when your income to debt ratio is so big you get laughed at by mortgage brokers, even when mortgage payments would be less than renting.

In 2015 in the wake of the collapse of Corinthian/ITT and the new Gainful Employment laws being passed, CEC sold Brooks to another company and was shuttered within a year.

We were paying close to $30k+ a year on what was now a debt so large, that it would take more than a lifetime to pay off on what we were currently earning. With our private loan interest rates now at 11% or more. They refused to release our cosigners even after years of on-time payments.

We tried to go back to school only to find out they lied about accreditation and being able to transfer credits. We would have to start all over and not have access to federal loans because we maxed out our usage through Brooks.

We tried to contact several lawyers and while a few were helpful most basically just told us we are screwed. The depression was really taking its toll. By this time we were married and had a child, though we wanted more kids, we chose permanent birth control measures as we would never be able to afford another without being in complete poverty due to these loans.

While our business was becoming moderately successful, we still saw at least half of our profits go to our student loans for years and then had to pay income taxes on those since we took them out of our business. It was like a punch to the gut every month. Never really getting to enjoy our success.

I started to turn the shame, depression, and anxiety over our situation into anger, fury, and drive. I needed to know why this was allowed to happen and turned my late-night crying into late-night research. Everything I could find on CEC, reaching out to old faculty and administrators, anyone that would talk to me and started compiling my evidence. I ended up connecting with other ‘Brookies’ in similar positions. I’m years into this and I’m still uncovering their deep level of corruption.

In 2016 in the wake of the announcement of Brooks shuttering we created a Facebook group to commiserate, and help each other work through all the shame and share ideas on what could be done about our situation. Estranged families, medical issues, foreclosure, homelessness. It became apparent, that I was one of the “lucky ones” meaning I was actually working as a photographer and making enough money to pay my bills. Babies and Brides are far from the in-depth documentary work I dreamed of doing, but I was still telling stories and making good images.

We started to organize and discovered the Borrower Defense to Repayment program that was reborn out of the Corinthian collapse, in which we encourage everyone to apply. There wasn’t even a web form, it was a government PDF you downloaded from a buried page on the DOE website, filled out, and mailed in. We shared evidence like graduation rates, job placement sheets, and marketing materials. Things we could use as proof/evidence to prove we were lied to and pushed into this lifelong crushing debt.

Doing the research I noticed there wasn’t a whole lot of information on the long-term impact these loans had on folks. I then started a google form to collect loan and life data on the borrowers. So far we have 489 borrowers who at this time hold an outstanding balance of over $70 MILLION in student loan debt!!!

Having the BDTR as an option finally felt like a sliver of light on what was a very dark decade. When Trump was elected, I was really upset, when he put DeVos in as secretary of education, I was crushed. When I found out Diane Jones was to be Principal Deputy of the DOE, I was absolutely devastated. Ms. Jones was a Senior executive at CEC.

We all braced for the worst, but also doubled down on our efforts. My friend and a core member of our team, Theresa Sweet [Sweet v. Devos] had been working with HERA [Housing and Economic Rights] in California and doing her own research. I on the east coast met with Harvard Law School’s ‘Project on Predatory Student Lending’ to share my research and helped with what eventually turned into Sweet v. DeVos. An ongoing class action lawsuit about the BDTR timeline or lack thereof, mistreatment of our applications, and denial of due process. There was a settlement on the table in early 2020, but that was thrown out when DeVos decided to rubber stamp deny 90% of the BDTR claims without even considering the evidence. My BDTR original application was 45 pages long and updated several times with new evidence over the years. I too received a rubber stamp denial. The judge threw out the settlement and ordered discovery which included depositions on everyone in the education department who worked with BDTR, DeVos refused the white house backed her. Even after she left office.

The silver lining of the pandemic gave me the time to put all my research together on a website. Being primarily a wedding photographer. I was able to use those months at home to work on the research and try to tell our story in a digestible and visually appealing way. It is by no means done, the depth of this corruption runs deep and our advocacy is ongoing.

Luckily a new administration was ushered in. While Biden is friendly with the student loan industry, he campaigned on student loan forgiveness. There was now a huge spotlight on the issue. Other for-profit borrowers have joined forces and filed their own class actions. Organizations like The Debt Collective are a force to be reckoned with. I happily joined them as a for-profit “expert” meeting with the education department, being nominated to sit on the negotiated rules committee, but was voted by consensus, and in the end the for-profit industry froze out any for-profit borrowers from the process, backed by the DOE. It did not go unnoticed.

On June 22, 2022, a new Sweet v. DeVos [now Cardona] settlement was filed. All 200k+ class members will see their federal loans canceled, removed from their credit, and any money paid returned. For BDTR ‘post class’ members [anyone with a BDTR application between 6/22 and 11/4 when the settlement is signed] will have their applications processed within three years. This is a huge win, but we can’t actually really celebrate until it’s signed in Nov.

This is only a small win in a big war. Many Brookies, including ourselves, have huge private loan debt we still owe. The first battle is [hopefully] won and we march on.

The next steps are private loans, a documentary to tell our story, and the ultimate goal. To see CEC shut down for good so they can stop trapping folks into lifelong debt for shareholder profits. They are still a publicly traded company that has rebranded to Pedoceo [PRDO]

Looking back on the last 20 years, I no longer regret my choice in Brooks. The advocacy work I have done, the amazing people I have met through this, and the fact I met my incredible husband and have the most amazing child are all based on that one day 20 years ago. The full circle is I am telling a story that is changing the world for the better. I am helping free others from this debt trap.

Please take some time to read about how this happened on our HISTORY page and who it has impacted on our DATA page.