Trade School Loses Its Accreditation : Education: The Encino-based Unified Schools of America is also targeted in a state criminal investigation. It is accused of ‘bait and switch’ tactics.

A national trade school association has revoked the accreditation of an Encino-based chain of schools, which also is the subject of a criminal investigation by the state of California.

The action of the Washington-based Career College Assn. could halt millions of dollars in government-backed loans to students of Unified Schools of America, which has six campuses in the Los Angeles area, association spokesman Brian Thompson said Wednesday.

Unified Schools is accused of luring students into $4,500 courses for receptionists, security guards and auto mechanics through newspaper “help wanted” ads promising jobs in those fields. People applying for work allegedly are steered instead to USA training programs and instructed to get government-backed loans.

The “bait and switch” tactic is one of many improprieties alleged in a lengthy affidavit filed last month in Los Angeles Municipal Court by a state investigator seeking the seizure of records from two Unified Schools facilities.

California Justice Department agent Del Bender said the chain regularly falsified attendance and grade records of students to “maximize the amount of money it receives,” while giving slipshod training--providing only one car hoist for students in auto-repair classes, for instance, and making them supply their own vehicles.

In a 20-month period that ended in May, $16.5 million in government guaranteed loans were given to students at Unified Schools campuses in Azusa, Compton, Lawndale, Los Angeles, Van Nuys and Whittier, according to the affidavit.

Fifty-nine boxes of company and student records were seized from the Van Nuys site during the Oct. 10 raids, which also targeted the corporate headquarters in Encino, court records show.

While the state attorney general’s office frequently brings civil actions against trade schools, this is the first such criminal investigation, according to Deputy Atty. Gen. Jerry Smilowitz. “We have been filing civilly, but it appeared the practices of USA went over a certain line,” he said.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, which recently filed criminal charges against two smaller trade schools, is helping in the investigation of Unified Schools.

Unified Schools officials did not return phone calls seeking comment.

The chain’s accreditation was officially revoked last week by the nonprofit Career College Assn.’s Accrediting Commission for Trade and Technical Schools in Washington. Unless the chain can overturn that action in court, it will almost certainly mean an end to government-backed loans for students, officials said.

The chain still is licensed to do business in California, but the state licensing agency is expected to “go back in and look at the school,” said Shiela Hawkins, acting executive director of California’s Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education. “We just got notice that they lost their accreditation,” Hawkins said Wednesday.

The Career College Assn. would not detail the grounds for its disciplinary action against Unified Schools. Documents filed to support the search of the chain’s offices, however, state that “accrediting standards require schools to observe ethical practices and procedures in the recruitment of their students and prohibit explicit or implicit promises of employment.”

But when a team from the accrediting commission inspected Unified Schools’ Lawndale branch last spring, each of the 37 students questioned said they had been drawn to the program by answering “help wanted” ads and through employment agencies serving as a front for Unified Schools, court records show.

When they called to apply for the job, they were directed to the employment agencies where “each learned there was ‘no job,’ or they were ‘not qualified,’ ” the inspectors said, “but that training was available” at a nearby Unified Schools facility.

Unified Schools never provided “the training or job placement as represented,” the court affidavit said.

Similar experiences were outlined in a series of complaints filed by students with the attorney general’s office.

A Van Nuys woman, who described herself as a “new immigrant,” said she answered a PennySaver ad that promised: “Earn up to $380 weekly, no experience necessary if 18+, willing to train.”

She said she was induced to borrow $4,025 for an eight-week course in auto tuneups at Unified Schools’ Van Nuys campus. “I had never before opened up the hood of a motor car,” she said.

Students were given “poor Xerox copies” as workbooks, she said, and spent half the day watching videotapes. They were given weekly tests, she said, but provided with questions in advance and anyone who failed was allowed “to rewrite a few pages from the test books to receive a pass.”

She wound up with a 96% grade and a certificate of “scholastic achievement.”

The woman said she actually got a job, paying $240 a week, but was told after two weeks that “I never knew how to do a tuneup and I had to go to school again. The whole course was a scam.”

Another student complained that he had enrolled in training as a security guard, and when he finally went to the shooting range he was given a gun with a bent barrel.

“I owe the bank around $6,000,” he said, adding that he never became a security guard.

The affidavit by Bender, the state investigator, said a former employee of Unified Schools’ Lawndale facility told him “she found that some of the students could not read or write, some acted crazy, some were drug addicts and some only spoke Spanish.”

Another former employee said a company executive stated flatly: “The students will be pushed through the school. I’m not about to refund any money.”

A series of government reports have described abuses of loan programs by trade schools, which teach everything from massage to truck driving.

In May, federal investigators in Washington charged that the government’s guaranteed loan program had become a costly failure, with some schools reaping huge profits while students defaulted on nearly $13 billion in loans since 1983.

Lax supervision in the 1980s allowed the program to be “riddled with fraud and abuse,” the Senate report said, stating that more than half of all federal funds allocated for such student aid now must be used to pay off soured loans.

Many students who took out the loans received “little or no training, no jobs and significant debts that they cannot possibly repay,” the report said.

California has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of vocational schools, with about 500,000 students enrolled in 3,000 training programs.

To curb abuses, last year the state created the Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education to oversee such schools and ensure their financial solvency and academic credibility.