Nursing Students Sue Florida For-Profit School, HCI College, for Deceitful Scheme to Block Students From Taking Licensing Exam and Trap Them in Debt
HCI misled students about accreditation status and licensing exam passage rates, forced them to repeat classes, and operated a deliberate scheme to block 95% of students from taking the RN licensing exam (NCLEX) in order to falsely inflate passage rates and increase profits
BOSTON – A group of nursing students at Florida’s HCI College (formerly Health Career Institute) filed a lawsuit against the for-profit school for a deliberate scheme to block 95% of students from graduating and taking the RN licensing exam (NCLEX) and for misrepresenting its accreditation status and NCLEX passage rates.
The lawsuit, brought by four named plaintiffs on behalf of hundreds of HCI College students, was filed in Federal Court in West Palm Beach. The students are demanding to have their institutional debts canceled and payments refunded, and are seeking additional damages and an injunction to require HCI to allow all students to take the NCLEX exam so they may move on with their lives and careers.
The filing details a specific and egregious series of scams enacted by HCI College. After being put on probation in 2018 and 2019 for having NCLEX passage rates that did not meet Florida state law standards for nursing programs, and after failing to attain programmatic accreditation, HCI, rather than investing in improving its education programs, cheated the system so it could continue to enroll students under the guise of a “new” program with a separate state identification number, without disclosing its probation and accreditation status. HCI enrolled students in this program with no intention of allowing the vast majority of them a fair shot at becoming a registered nurse. Instead, HCI arbitrarily prevented 95% of students from taking the NCLEX exam — unfairly dropping them from the program or forcing them to pay to retake classes that were not transferable — in order to inflate its NCLEX passage rates that it used to lure students into its program under false pretenses.
“HCI set nurses up to fail from the start. This scam shows just how easily schools can manipulate the system to falsify outcomes, at students’ expense,” said Eileen Connor, President and Director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending. “Predatory nursing programs like HCI flourish in Florida in plain sight, abusing the federal student aid program and the people of Florida without accountability. Florida needs to build a qualified workforce to care for its aging population, but the state’s lax oversight is instead enabling a predatory system that disproportionately harms women and people of color and thwarts their attempts to serve their fellow Floridians as licensed nurses. Students are exposing HCI’s scam to prevent others from falling into the debt trap set up by these profit-seeking institutions.”
Many of the plaintiffs and class members in the case include front-line medical workers who worked through the pandemic as caregivers in medical settings and are now trying to advance their careers in the profession. The majority are women and people of color, including many working single mothers.
Florida already has the worst NCLEX passage rate of any state in the country, particularly since it moved to relax oversight of nursing schools in 2009 in anticipation of a deficit in qualified nurses to take care of the state’s aging population. Students argue that lack of regulation and oversight is trapping nursing students in an endless cycle of debt instead of building the qualified workforce Florida needs to help address a health care staffing crisis.
"I am fortunate to be working with such an intelligent and devoted team of lawyers in pursuit of justice for our clients and others taken advantage of by the Defendant,” said Florida attorney and co-counsel Nicole Mayer. “For-profit colleges like HCI have exploited Florida's nursing shortage for their own financial gain at the expense of Floridians seeking to better themselves, their families, and our communities. While owners of these 'schools' rake in tens of millions of dollars, their victims are left with tens of thousands in debt and time they'll never get back. This must stop."
The complaint further details:
The school’s clinical relationship with a Cleveland Clinic medical center in Weston, Florida, was terminated by Cleveland Clinic in the summer of 2021 because of HCI’s lack of programmatic accreditation. Once this clinical site was no longer available, students were directed to study hall settings to complete their required clinical hours. Clinical instructors routinely canceled these sessions so that they did not have to drive to campus and sent students instructions to complete their clinical timesheets from home.
Beginning sometime before May of 2021, HCI adopted a new grading policy as a way of weeding out students and forcing them to retake semesters they had already paid for. Under the new policy, students were required to achieve both an 80 percent overall score and at least 50 percent in every category of the high-stakes “predictor” exams in order to advance through the program.
Some students who were forcibly expelled for not passing the new high-stakes testing requirements were told that they were being removed from the student body on the basis of “academic integrity.”
In the fall of 2021, only five students out of a class of over 100 passed the new final exam and were permitted to graduate.
According to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN), only 8 students who graduated in December 2021 went on to take the NCLEX-RN in the first quarter of 2022.
Plaintiff Statements:
“The reason I chose HCI was because they said it was made for working adults. What you don’t know going in is that they are setting you up to fail — it’s all sunshine and butterflies until you sign on the dotted line,” said plaintiff Rebecca Freeman. “Other schools are in it for student success. They have tutoring, staffing, clinicals. HCI does not have student success at heart, they have making money at heart. I made A’s every semester and on predictor tests, then they change the benchmark for the exit exam and you fail. I want to sit for my boards. That is what I’m owed.”
“What hurts me the most is they knew we wouldn’t be okay — they knew they were going to fail us, take our money, that we would never get our license or be able to transfer to another school — and they didn’t care,” said plaintiff Bianca Vinas. “Nursing is already a scary profession to get into during this time. Most of the students represented here are people who chose, during a pandemic, to sacrifice their own wellbeing to help others and they are now being put in a position where not only they can’t do that, they have their livelihood taken away from them.”
“HCI appealed to me and many other single moms because they offered night classes and the ability to finish in a year,” said plaintiff Brittany Roberson. “I wanted to become a travel nurse. I wanted to get my masters and become a nurse practitioner. Instead, this situation has displaced me from my 16 year old daughter, putting me in a position where I couldn't continue to live in Florida. I want my money back and to be sent to the boards. I’ve already paid and done the work, but I can’t take these credentials to another school and I can’t pay to start over.”
“I enrolled in May 2020 and started to get nervous when there were no clinicals, the teachers were horrible, and you couldn’t get straight answers as they kept changing the rules and policies,” said plaintiff Tiffany King. “It was easy to just blame Covid for everything at that time. But I made it to the end and then the first day of that last semester I found out they changed the program and the new testing requirements made it almost impossible to pass — it felt like someone took a knife and stuck it right in my chest.”
About the Project on Predatory Student Lending
Established in 2012, the Project on Predatory Student Lending represents over a million former students of predatory for-profit colleges. Its mission is to use litigation to eliminate predatory practices in higher education, and to relieve current and future borrowers from fraudulent student loan debt. PPSL has won landmark cases to protect borrower rights, recover money owed, and cancel more than $10 billion in fraudulent debt. Its ongoing cases hold predatory colleges accountable and force the U.S. Department of Education to act on behalf of students and stop protecting this insidious industry.