My sense is that they really don't understand what they bought. If they actually enforce federally mandated attendance policies, enrollment will likely drop (even more)dramtically. The nature of the market (fewer well-qualified potential students, roughly the same number of schools) makes it more challenging to enroll a high percentage of students who will attend and complete. CCI has long employed highly questionable tactics in order to find and sign students, and enrollment was dropping even before the June DOE debacle. What will cause enrollment to increase, or even stabilize? Other than feeding ECMC's bad-debt pipeline, I don't see a bright future. Sorry for the dark cloud view....happy to see well-reasoned alternatives. Or juvenile, obscenity-laced rants. Your choice.
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Rest assured folks, they have already employed experienced non profit education professionals to review what they bought. Just because they purchased all those campuses doesn't mean those campuses are staying in business. They bought them all for pennies...so they have maximum flexibility to reduce costs, which is what Non profits do. They don't have to "learn how things operate", they will simply implement "the way things WILL operate." RIFS are coming, first bloated managment then bloated enrollment salaried folk, then the offer for remaining enrollment at roughly 70% of current CCI salary, then a right sizing of finance and academics. The first thing every new owner does is find the waste, and CCI has a lot of that.
Hopeful they will fire all the Directors & VPs they were responsible for the culture none of them are trustworthy.
Well, I guess it'll be up to me to try to put a positive spin on things. (1) This is certainly a better outcome than bankruptcy and being sold for parts. The new company intends to turn us non-profit (goodbye slavish devotion to shareholders and quarterly reports) and stay in the education industry. (2) It seems as though somebody had some common sense and stopped the underhanded "servicing" scam that would have kept us all in bed with CCi via financial aid processing, marketing and other functions. ECMC will come up with their own marketing model and we'll be integrated into a corporate culture that cannot be worse than CCi. (3) This company has no experience in running colleges and won't know what to look for when trimming costs. That could swing both ways, but probably means they'll be very hesitant to let too many people go before they learn how to run things themselves. That buys most of us at least another year of employment. And (4) You never know - they might be a dynamic, ethical company who might turn out to be great to work for!
Any buyer would have been faced with the same dilemma. Schools will need to be downsized or closed to handle the decreased enrollment; this was going to happen no matter what. The entire company is toxic and will remain so for at least a year or two, if not much longer.
They are a very young company and overly ambitious. They've done well on government contracts and are feeling like life's easier than people make it out to be, but they're really just naive. They have taken on a monster, both in sheer size, potential legal liability, and nature of its culture. I fear this is going to be an unmitigated disaster, and will start to fall apart very quickly. It's hubris.
My thoughts exactly, especially considering they (ECMC) are wanting to maintain the title of largest non-profit career education school.