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Duane Morris lawyer defends career schools against government regulators

Keith Zakarin has a tough argument to make, but that is, after all, what lawyers are paid to do. Zakarin is a partner at Center City's Duane Morris, where he chairs a practice group that represents more than a hundred career schools and colleges and industry groups. The firm is one of a handful nationwide that have made the sector a thriving, profitable practice.

Keith Zakarin has a tough argument to make, but that is, after all, what lawyers are paid to do.

Zakarin is a partner at Center City's Duane Morris, where he chairs a practice group that represents more than a hundred career schools and colleges and industry groups. The firm is one of a handful nationwide that have made the sector a thriving, profitable practice.

Its clients are largely vocational and occupational training programs; they teach a variety of trades and skills from cosmetology to nursing to criminal justice, among many others, with degree programs of up to four years.

These can be stepping-stone occupations for children of the poor and lower middle class.

Lately, the sector has been taking a pounding from state attorneys general and the federal Department of Education who say that deceptive marketing practices aimed at a vulnerable low-income population have left legions of students with heavy debt loads and little prospect for employment.

It is Zakarin's mission to push back against this critique.

"It is the nimbleness of these schools that make them so terrific," said Zakarin, who is based in San Diego. "For the country to prosper, you need people who are able to work in some kind of occupational way, and these schools, unlike traditional academic schools, fill that need. Graduates from these schools are ready to work."

For all their recent notoriety, career schools have been around since the 19th century. Andrew Carnegie attended night school at a commercial college to learn bookkeeping before launching his career as a steel baron; John D. Rockefeller, oil and railroad magnate, studied at a career college in Cleveland.

But a slew of reports, lawsuits and regulatory actions depict an industry that has been pockmarked by abuse. From 2012 through 2015, the state of California filed multiple lawsuits against what was then one of the nation's largest career school companies, Corinthian Colleges. The state accused Corinthian of engaging in deceptive marketing practices, loading students up with debt and failing to deliver on promises that the school's program would lead to employment.

In April 2015 the Department of Education fined Corinthian $30 million and the company closed shortly after.

The Department of Education, meanwhile, has been tightening financial aid rules for career schools, requiring them to show that graduates are gainfully employed and not laboring under massive amounts of debt. The rule is expected to wipe out hundreds of institutions.

The practice at Duane Morris began decades ago when the firm started to represent Empire Beauty Schools of Pottsville. But the practice took off in 2004 when Zakarin joined the firm, bringing a healthy book of career school business. That practice now has up to 20 full-time lawyers who devote their time exclusively to career school clients.

Zakarin is an aggressive advocate. He writes op-eds, touches base with regulators, and speaks at industry conferences.

In essence, his argument is that absent career schools, a huge educational need would go unfilled. Traditional public universities and private nonprofit colleges don't have the interest or the capacity to train millions of students who can't find placement in traditional schools and aspire to careers in cosmetology, or food preparation and restaurant work.

Coding schools, which have proliferated as the tech industry has burgeoned, are a classic example, he said. Two-year community colleges that might have been expected to pick up the slack haven't, he maintained, and private, for-profit coding schools emerged to fill the void.

Zakarin asserts that there's a lot of snobbery in the attack on career schools.

"There's an ideological bias," says Zakarin, a graduate of the prestigious Boalt Hall law school at the University of California Berkeley. "Our students, unlike those at Stanford and Harvard, are typically the first in their families [to go beyond secondary education]. The thought is, unless you are at an academic school, you are not legitimate."

Zakarin grants that there have been abuses, but maintains they've been cleaned up. Still, the Obama administration is coming on strong and has made it clear that it will tighten controls on federal aid, a move that could force hundreds of the nation's nearly 4,000 career and vocational schools to close.

If that happens, Zakarin said, the country will lose important educational resources for a population that needs them the most.

cmondics@phillynews.com

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