Class action against Lloyd Clayton and Clayton College has some interesting tidbits

I happened upon this PDF of the initial class action filed on behalf of all of the students of the unwonderful and unaccredited Clayton College for Natural Health who were shafted when the school abruptly shut down with no notice.

While there's nothing earth shattering in there, among other things, it alleges:

-- LloydClayton's control of the school was almost complete; he owned most or all of the stock, and there was little if any separation between CCNH funds and his personal funds.

-- "Admissions counselors" were compensated in part on how much of the total tuition they were able to collect up front, not on the success or completion of degrees by students

-- The school was thought to have as many as several thousand active students who had paid as much as $15,000 in advance for a degree they could take up to 5 years to complete. Some students paid the day before the school shut down and were not offered refunds.

-- Reading between the lines, the attorneys are appearing to assert that when they began to get wind of the fact that they'd never get DETC accreditation, they fired the woman who was working on it, drained a ton of money out of the school, and shut it down, telling the employees nothing until the very day they were fired.

None of this will come as a huge surprise to anyone familiar with the long and extremely undistinguished history of this unwonderful. I'm really glad to see it gone, but I'm also sorry that so many people got shafted. However, given that Clayton degrees were of very limited utility (any state with licensure of naturopaths didn't allow Clayton grads), and their graduates woefully unqualified to actually treat anyone for anything, it's a huge service to those who might otherwise be taken in by the claims of unqualified Clayton graduates that the place is gone.

 

Wow. That's about all I can muster at the moment.

 

Thanks for this, Chip.

Clayton is just one more sad reminder of a miserable "school" that got the ".edu" designation from EduCause, and used it to fool a great many people.

I wanted to review some of the pre-shut-down websites, but they've done their homework: all 96 earlier sites listed at archive.org are now inaccessible.

But Lloyd Clayton himself, "the grand old man of distance learning in the United States" (according to an earlier Clayton website) is apparently alive and well (at 89), and readily findable on any of the usual people-finding sites.

 

I suspect Clayton got its .edu domain back when Network Solutions was handing them out to anyone who asked, as long as they claimed to be running a school. There are still hundreds of fake schools (and, for that matter, legitimate elementary and secondary schools, which are no longer eligible for .edu) who have these addresses.

My guess is it would be prohibitively expensive for Educause to try and terminate domains held by unqualified entities because of the inevitable lawsuits that would result.

 

Chip: "My guess is it would be prohibitively expensive for Educause to try and terminate domains held by unqualified entities because of the inevitable lawsuits that would result."

John: Yeah, but . . .
Yeahbut #1: EduCause has recently stated that they are unable and/or unwilling to do the research necessary for a new .edu applicant.
Yeahbut #2: The granting of suffixes is a function of the U.S. Department of Commerce, which has contracted with EduCause to do the work. With the stroke of a pen, our leader could issue an executive order transferring the responsibility back to Commerce, or to DegreeInfo, or anywhere else he wishes.
Yeahbut #3: The Dept of Commerce could simply state that as of a given date, only schools with recognized accreditation could use the .edu . . . while acknowledging that other schools can be quite legal, and therefore they will have their own domain, signifying "operates legally but without recognized accreditation." So what might that 3-letter domain be?

 

Now, that would be something. I call dibs for a seat on the committee.