As a guarantor of student loans that specialized in collecting from students on the precipice of bankruptcy, the Educational Credit Management Corporation saw up close the "impact of students taking on debt, dropping out of school and being no better off than when they started college in terms of being able to find well-paying jobs," says David Hawn, the nonprofit guaranty agency's chief executive officer.
So after initially "laughing and saying 'no way'"when ECMC was first approached last year about buying parts of thefailing Corinthian Colleges chain, Hawn perceived an opportunity.
"When I became president and CEO of ECMC in February a year ago, it became a passion of mine that we try to figure this out, to do something different" in the way low-income students seeking postsecondary education and career-related training finance and complete their studies, Hawn said.
The guarantor never envisioned becoming an operator of career colleges itself -- let alone "perhaps the most distressed school assets on the planet," as Hawn calls them -- but that's exactly what ECMC did in February, when the U.S. Education Department signed off on a sale of 53 of the failing for-profit Corinthian's campuses (with 33,000 students) to Zenith Education Group, an ECMC subsidiary, for $24 million.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/04/purchaser-defunct-profit-begins-plot-strategy