[This story was updated on September 8.]
Last year, James Soloway called hundreds of prospective students per day on behalf of a company that placed advertisements on Google and Bing. The ads promised to help students contact the admissions offices of public colleges if they filled out an online form and included their phone number.
He told students that they would hear from their preferred public college, even though they almost never did. In the meantime, he said, they should consider attending a for-profit college—such as Kaplan University and Westwood College.
Most of the prospective students were confused. Some hung up. But sometimes the pitch worked. Some people, especially high-school students, believed he was an educational counselor and gave weight to his recommendations, he says.
The entire process was designed to redirect students who wanted information on a public college to a for-profit college, Mr. Soloway says. “The expectation was that we were not to allow a call to end with a student until we had created three private-school leads.”
The account offers new details about the practices of lead-generation companies that place misleading search ads to lure prospective students. (Mr. Soloway’s full description of the call center’s activities is available here.) In a July 31 article, The Chronicle reported on dozens of ads on Google and Bing that falsely implied relationships with public colleges in order to get students to give away information that can be sold to for-profits.
Mr. Soloway made calls on behalf of one of those lead-generation companies, Vantage Media, from March to December 2010. The company contracted with a call center run by Mr. Soloway’s employer, Inspyre Solutions.
A Vantage spokeswoman, Wendy Barbour, disputes Mr. Soloway’s account and says it is not consistent with Vantage’s policies or practices. The objective of the program is to match students with programs they have expressed an interest in, she wrote in an e-mail.
In particular, Mr. Soloway’s claim that he was expected to keep students on the phone long enough to deliver three leads is false, she says. Agents are trained to offer appropriate educational options, she says, and are not compensated on the basis of the quantity of inquiries they generate.
“If we match to programs that aren’t relevant, there is no value to our client schools, the students, and by consequence, none to Vantage Media,” she says.
Ms. Barbour cites the company’s training guide, which specifies that agents should never force students to receive anything they are not interested in. “There is no education company that pays more attention to the experience of prospective students and compliance than Vantage Media,” she says.
A Kaplan spokeswoman declined to comment, and a representative of Westwood did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Soloway estimates that Vantage’s online marketing efforts resulted in at least 2,000 prospects per week at the call center, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he worked. He says he is speaking publicly about his former work because he regrets helping to deceive students.
After learning that students never heard back from the public colleges they were trying to reach—and realizing that he might soon be fired for poor performance—he quit his job and, in February, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about Vantage’s practices.
“I feel bad that I was part of something that took advantage of people, a lot of them kids still in high school,” he says.
Mr. Soloway says he was given a single day of training before starting to work on behalf of Vantage. That made it difficult to advise students on their educational options, he says. For instance, he says, he started without knowing the differences among various nursing degrees.
Ms. Barbour, the Vantage spokeswoman, says agents are trained not to act as counselors to students, and so they are not supposed to have detailed knowledge of what a particular college offers.
She says that students’ information is promptly delivered to the college they requested information from, and that colleges appreciate the service.
But officials at five colleges mentioned in Vantage’s search ads said in July that they had never heard of the company. And Mr. Soloway says that “not one student ever advised me that they ever heard from the school they thought they were contacting via Vantage Media’s Web sites.”
Some of the college officials said they worried that their institutions’ reputations would suffer if students—thinking they were applying to that college—had a bad experience, even if it was not the college’s fault. Others said the activities of companies like Vantage seemed unlikely to confuse students or were too time-consuming for the colleges to deal with.
Mr. Soloway says he knows firsthand that the danger to public colleges is real. “I just don’t understand why, collectively, public schools don’t come together to have all their names taken off Vantage Media’s Web sites,” he says. “Students are being misinformed. Public-school reputations are being damaged.”