WASHINGTON — House Democrats filed subpoenas on Thursday to compel three staffers at the U.S. Department of Education to testify before Congress as part of an investigation into the agency’s role in the collapse of the Art Institutes, the Pittsburgh-based college chain that folded last year.
The demand for witness testimony comes almost three months after the House Education and Labor Committee published a report that accused the Trump administration of failing to protect Art Institute students.
The committee’s report, published after a year-long investigation that reviewed nearly 1,600 pages of supporting documents, has argued the school’s owners knowingly deceived students about a loss of accreditation.
The committee has alleged the department knew about the accreditation issues and attempted to help the schools cover it up by, among other things, passing a rule allowing schools to retroactively accredit their courses.
The department has strongly denied those accusations, saying its rule allowing retroactive accreditation has no connection to the accreditation issues at the Art institutes.
Yet the committee has argued the department has failed to provide information it has requested, relying thus far on leaked documents from a source it has not identified.
The committee’s chair, Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., wrote Thursday in a letter accompanying the subpoenas that the department had effectively stalled the investigation by ignoring requests for information, dumping unrelated documents and blackening useful documents with unexplained redactions.
The committee provided a correspondence log showing 109 times the committee and department had traded communications since the investigation started on July 16, 2019 — to no avail, Mr. Scott wrote.
“Due to the department’s obstruction, the committee’s only available avenue to obtain an accurate understanding of the department’s role in the Dream Center collapse is to pursue depositions of the knowledgeable Department officials under subpoena,” Mr. Scott wrote.
The subpoenas, reviewed by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, show the officials were requested to appear before the committee during separate hearings on Nov. 6, Nov. 10 and Nov. 16.
The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
On Friday, Angela L. Morabito, the department’s press secretary, said in an emailed statement that the subpoenas were “wholly unreasonable” because the committee had refused to review all the documents first. She wrote the department had cooperated and offered the committee the chance to review relevant documents.
“Instead of conducting business in a lawful, rational, and responsible way, the unhinged Democrats have resorted to badgering career civil servants to carry on what is nothing more than a witch hunt,” Ms. Morabito wrote.
The finger-pointing in Washington comes after the sudden and dramatic closure of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and several other campuses long owned by Pittsburgh-based Education Management Corp.
The for-profit education company sold those schools in 2017 to Dream Center Education Holdings, a nonprofit affiliated with a Pentecostal church that had no experience in higher education. The $60 million deal involved dozens of colleges that enrolled roughly 60,000 students and employed about 15,000 faculty and staff.
The new owners promised the nonprofit status would breathe new life into beleaguered schools that had seen precipitous drops in enrollment.
But the complicated nature of the deal — and Dream Center’s ties to for-profit schools — also drew questions from the country’s six regional accreditation agencies. Accreditation, higher education's way of enforcing quality-control measures, reviews finances, academics, policies and other measures to ensure schools are meeting minimum standards.
Dream Center shuttered about half the schools it bought, then the rest were transferred to federal receivership.
The Art Institute of Pittsburgh closed abruptly on March 8, 2019, shocking many of its graduates.
The closures displaced of thousands of students across the country and caused student loan defaults that could cost taxpayers up to $1 billion, Mr. Scott’s committee has estimated.
Daniel Moore: dmoore@post-gazette.com, Twitter @PGdanielmoore
Story updated at 8:55 a.m. on Oct. 23, 2020.
First Published: October 22, 2020, 8:18 p.m.