Legal Trouble on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams

The Los Angeles Film School is caught up in a scandal over its alleged efforts to trick students into believing that its graduates do extraordinarily well in the Hollywood job market. The accusation comes from two former executives of the school, wherein no doubt there is the plot outline for a noir-ish movie about double- and triple-crosses in the shadows of Sunset Boulevard. Happily the Los Angeles Film School sits at 6363 Sunset Boulevard, and it is a private, for-profit entity, just like a movie studio or a casino.

I admit that the troubles on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams are not my usual beat. I’m more accustomed to the smooth operators of the Ivy League and the grifters of the state universities. But since the dawn of Hollywood there has never been a shortage of young people to say, in the words of Green Day, “Sometimes I wish someone out there [would] find me.” And a fair number of those who harbor such wishes are lured by the Los Angeles Film School, where “Hollywood is your classroom.”

The pockets (allegedly) picked in this instance are not just those of the students. My news in this case comes from that key source for higher-ed intel, Variety. The pockets (allegedly) picked in this instance are not just those of the students. The federal government was (allegedly) fleeced, as well. Can I skip the “allegedly” from this point on? I stipulate that this is all about allegations, and, this being Los Angeles, those allegations could well disappear with the re-write.

“‘Nearly all’ of the tens of millions of dollars the school receives each year from federal student aid programs is the result of fraud.” Most of the school’s students qualified for federal student loans: money that can be spent only to pay tuition at educational institutions that meet certain criteria. This is to prevent students from being fleeced at degree mills. The government determines whether a school is a degree mill by the percentage of students who graduate and get a well-paying job in their field of study. The Los Angeles Film School has an abundance of attractive programs, from “Animation: Environment and Character Design” to “Audio Production” and “Film Cinematography.” A bachelor’s degree in one of these costs about $80,000.

A reasonably prudent student might have some doubts about the likelihood that such a degree would pay off.

But the Los Angeles Film School website explains under “Alumni Success” that “graduation is just the beginning.” It is replete with stories of alumni who made it big. “LA Film School Graduates Dominate Hollywood & Beyond in March,” etc.

This may be true, but the two whistleblowers explain that many of the graduates end up in illusory jobs created by the school itself. This is where the story gets interesting: The school (allegedly!) “self-financed thousands of temporary employment opportunities for their graduates through schemes with non-profits and paid-off vendors to give the false impression to incoming students and federal regulators that their graduates were gainfully employed.” And this in turn means, as Variety explains, that “‘nearly all’ of the tens of millions of dollars the school receives each year from federal student aid programs is the result of fraud.” “Tens of millions” turns out to be $85 million per year in the form of student loans and veterans’ grants.

The Los Angeles Film School, as I mentioned, is a private outfit. I will venture the guess that it does not cost the school anything like $85 million per year to offer the sandbox curriculum it provides its students. So where does the money go? The school is owned by James Heavener and his three partners, who, says Variety, “also own and control Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida.” Now I am back on more familiar ground. Full Sail began as a recording studio in Ohio, Full Sail Productions. But it raised its main sheet in 2005 to offer bachelor’s degrees. It has, let’s say, a dubious reputation, but its programs in film and media studies have thrived, and it pulls in some $377 million per year in federal financial assistance. So the Los Angeles Film School is just a little side venture.

As the clean-up crew in the U.S. Department of Education get to work, they may want to take a closer look at Full Sail as well as the Los Angeles Film School. Not that I am aware of any shenanigans.

The entertainment industry would appear to be a prime target for the kind of grift that the Los Angeles Film School (allegedly) pursues. It is a world where the number who dream of a career far exceeds the available jobs. The aspirants who lack much in the way of relevant experience see academic training and a diploma as a way in and are thus primed to believe that the program will work as advertised.

A diploma is not likely to open any doors to one of the film-industry trades. But the truth is that most of the relevant skills are best learned on the job. Classroom training has a place but surely not four years of it, and a diploma is not likely to open any doors to one of the trades. Moreover, Hollywood is shrinking. I have this from the few people I know who work in the industry, in areas such as set design, but this isn’t just anecdotal. CNN Business recently headlined a story, “What’s happening to Hollywood? The mass exodus of a shrinking industry.” Says CNN: “The number of on-location productions is plummeting in Hollywood, and it’s impacting every sector of the industry from talent to vendors and everyone in between.”

One would think that would-be students aiming at careers in the fields taught by the Los Angeles Film School would be alert to this reality. Part of what has happened is that California has priced itself out of the market. Other states such as Georgia offer better incentives, and other countries, including Canada, have lured producers away, as well. One would think that would-be students aiming at careers in the fields taught by the Los Angeles Film School would be alert to this reality. They might also be wise to pay attention to Tilly Norwood and her imaginary friends. Tilly is the alluring all-digital actress who currently threatens onscreen talent, but there is hardly an off-screen entertainment job that cannot already be done by some version of AI. Is it worth $80,000 to get credentialed for a non-existent job in an industry that has already left town?

My real interest in the Los Angeles Film School is that it is a microcosm of contemporary higher education. Its grift may be more obvious and the naiveté of its students more painful to behold, but these are differences of degree not kind. Inflating job-placement rates is a predatory practice most often associated with for-profit schools, but that may well be because so little attention is paid to the others. No one expects philosophy or English majors to segue easily into the job market, and the current surfeit of computer-science graduates is excused by the time lag between an industry boom and the years it takes to gain the relevant credential.

But there is more going on. In 2011, there was a flurry of lawsuits again law schools for having inflated their job-placement rates by creating temporary jobs for their own graduates. Fifteen law schools were targeted. The suits were generally dismissed for lack of evidence, but few doubted the schools were fudging their data. When placement rates really matter, schools have been known to lie.

And placement rates are beginning to matter more than ever. Outside the top-tier colleges and universities, enrollment is either falling or barely holding even. Demography is destiny for higher education. The decline in the national birth rate since 2008 and the continuing reluctance of Americans to have children mean that there are not enough bodies to fill the expensive seats at our colleges and universities. Add to that the decline in the number of men who choose to go to college and the economic incentives to go directly to work after high school, and you have a picture of an industry in decline. It hasn’t declined so rapidly as Hollywood and the entertainment industry, but it is not hard to see that coming. And, like the entertainment industry, higher education has to weigh the likely effects of AI. If you can make a realistic movie set out of pixels, why not a realistic white-collar worker?

That leaves colleges and universities with a very large temptation. If their graduates cannot find jobs in sufficient numbers to make college look like a good investment, why not place them in imaginary jobs? Perhaps the experts at the Los Angeles Film School can help with that. They won’t have to walk alone on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars.