Who We Are
Our Story
We are a group of former students, activists and volunteer law students who are dedicated to exposing HMI’s predatory recruiting scheme currently operating throughout the United States and Canada. As an organization, we are completely non-profit and ideologically motivated in our cause for justice for both current and former students who are victimized by Hope Medical Institute, Medical University of Silesia, and Medical University of Lublin. While Students from both schools suffered, HMI’s owners and the school officials at both institutions who enforced the scam, received millions of dollars per year from US Dept of ED Federal Loans, application fees and private loans. HMI is basically a predatory third party, which takes advantage of unsuspecting students and parents with false promises and exaggerated statistics. We will go into detail on how the predatory recruitment scheme functions in the next section, but an overview of the for profit school industry would provide a window into the basic overall struggle students and activists face with our quest for justice.
Industry Overview
The abundance of litigation/regulation/investigation into the predatory education industry is massive, taking decades to reach this point in history, so I will not include so much reading material on this website. I will however, include some valuable links below to several investigative journalists, who are specialists at exposing the industry practices. Regrettably, this scam was able to thrive for so long due to a variety of factors. Specifically, the US Department of Education and State authorities in various jurisdictions bear some responsibility. Their unwillingness to enforce existing laws only emboldened the predatory defendants. Secondly, the students and parents themselves bear a significant amount of the guilt. I will go into this aspect in the final folder/section, however, this is especially true with Hope Medical Institute, Medical University of Silesia, and Medical University of Lublin
This is a link to the project on predatory student lending. They are a non-profit law firm that files pro bono cases involving the for profit education industry. Originally, they were affiliated with Harvard and primarily filed cases against the US Dept of ED, usually involving student loans bankruptcy discharge from ITT and Corinthian Colleges, which closed down in 2015 after numerous lawsuits and government investigations. Many of these cases took years of litigation after being filed in Federal Court, often resulting in successful settlements for the student plaintiff’s Additional information on this program can be found online and on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthian_Colleges.
Since going private, this organization has filed a number of significant cases, including one of two class actions filed against southern California’s (USC) online Master of Social Work and a third party affiliated with the program https://www.ppsl.org/cases/luna-v-usc
https://www.republicreport.org/ is another great source of information related to predatory practices throughout the industry. David Halperin is a former attorney who worked in politics. He’s the main author and is one of the primary sources regarding past and present litigation/regulation against the industry. However, I do disagree with him on the issue of partisan politics, as he believes the Democratic Party is somehow more pro student civil rights comparing with the Republican Party. Our organization believes they are both equally awful and culpable, regardless of which pro-capitalist party controls the white house or congress.
For example, on this website he paraphrased the current education secretary under Biden. Cardona said, rightly, that the efforts the Department of Education has been making under President Biden to provide student loan relief, especially for students who were deceived by career colleges, won’t be enough if scam college programs remain in operation, creating new generations of victims. “Career training programs,” Cardona said today, “should lead to careers, not dead ends.” We also disagree that these regulations should be limited to career colleges, as many abuses have occurred with programs involving Law School and Medical School, which are not considered career professions . Our program is simply one of these programs, hence our reason for creating this website. We do very much agree that regulations proposed by Carona and King( the last education secretary to serve under Obama) are the basic minimum the federal government should be doing in order to properly regulate an industry ripe with abuse and financial enrichment. One such rule is the Gainful Employment regulation, which was first proposed by Obama, repealed by Trump, and re-introduced under Biden. Mr Halperin does a great job on his website hashing out the details of this rule and the current status of its implementation within the USDOE. It’s absolutely essential that a U.S. administration fight to protect students, and ensure that colleges getting federal aid help students build successful careers, rather than leaving students buried in debt they can never afford to repay (Halperin, 2023 )
Lastly, we wanted to mention InfiLaw , a for profit entity that owned three predatory law schools operating through the US, all three of which have since closed down after regulators, class action lawsuits and Federal FCA litigation exposed the programs many abuses. It was owned by Sterling Partners, a Chicago-based private equity firm, which created InfiLaw as a shell company to shield them from direct litigation. More information on this program can be found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiLaw_System