SAN ANTONIO – In a letter to student and teachers Career Point College the president and CEO Larry Earle said the school would be closing effective immediately.
Career Point is a two-year, for-profit college.
Dozens of students and teachers have called about the school’s closure and emailed KSAT a copy of the letter they reportedly received.
In the letter, Earle said school management had received information that employees have violated rules related to student aid. Earle said the college self-reported the incident to the Department of Education. The president then said the college had exhausted all available resources and due to funding restrictions from the Department of Education the college had no choice but to close.
The letter states:
Two months ago, the Career Point College management team discovered that three long-term employees had collaborated to violate the rules related to student aid funds. After conducting a full investigation, the president of the College self-reported the inappropriate activity to the Department of Education, and provided the Department of Education with a plan to repay all funds taken.
Even though no money was stolen, and even though the College had self-report the violation and agreed to repay all inappropriately received funds, the plan was not accepted. Instead, the Department of Education severely restricted government funds going to the College making it impossible for the College to continue operations. Finally, after exhausting all available resources, the College's management has been forced to discontinue operations.
Therefore, effective immediately, Career Point College is closed.
Since 1984, the College has had an impeccable record of complying with all federal and state regulations. In fact, the College has never had even one student lawsuit in its entire history. The College has one of the highest completion rates in state and last year the College's students had one of the highest vocational nursing pass rates on the nursing licensing examination (94 percent). The College is very proud of its support of the community and is proud that over its long history, the College has graduated and changed the lives of over 10,000 students.
However, in this very hostile government climate against for-profit schools, the Department of Education chose not to give the College a chance to fix its problems and instead chose to effectively terminate the College.
To all our very fine students, staff, and faculty, we are so sorry that we have to close this fine, old institution. The college's management is attempting to arrange various teach-out opportunities for our student, and we will provide that Information as it is available.
Over the next few weeks, we will be attempting to provide students transfer assistance to other college as that also becomes available.
Again, we apologize for closing the school, but in light of the actions by the Department of Education, we had no choice.
The impact of the reported closure is unknown.
KSAT has reached out to the school’s administrators and will update this story once we hear back from them.