Wright Career College is gone, but its students are still at the fringe of the job market — and so is Wright’s former president, if you believe his alimony petition

Bankruptcy cases generally don’t trigger sweeping orations from the bench, but U.S. District Judge Robert D. Berger didn’t hold back last month when he ordered an insurance company to pay $3 million to former students of the now-defunct Wright Career College. Representing the students, Berger said, was “a social good” performed by the Independence law firm Humphrey, Farrington & McClain. “It’s promoting good public policy in the United States,” he said.

Yes. But the lawyers representing 260 ex-student plaintiffs would be the first to say that their work would not have been needed had good public policy been applied much sooner to rein in the predatory practices of Wright and other profit-seeking schools.

“What I heard time and time again when talking to these students was about the hope that had been taken from them,” says Andrew Smith, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys. “They found people that the rest of the world had set aside and they said, ‘We’ll be the ones to help you.’ They sold hope that they never had the right to sell. These students wanted more than a worthless piece of paper.”

Like other so-called career colleges, Wright’s campuses in Overland Park, Wichita, Omaha, Oklahoma City and Tulsa roped in students with aggressive sales techniques and promises of degrees and certificates that would open doors to good-paying, purposeful jobs. Instead, they delivered exorbitant tuition, fees sometimes exceeding $1,000 a semester (excluding books), inept and ever-changing instructors, and, finally, worthless credentials.

Humphrey, Farrington & McClain, like its plaintiffs, was prepared to expose Wright’s sleaziness in a trial. But the school filed for bankruptcy in April 2016. The best the lawyers could do was negotiate a settlement with the insurance company representing Wright’s corporate owner, Mission Group Kansas Inc. Former students who joined the lawsuit will receive payouts ranging from about $2,000 to a high of $10,000; most will be in the neighborhood of $5,000.

“Small solace,” is how Smith describes the settlement agreement. “It’s not absolute justice, but it’s the best we can do in an imperfect system with a really bad defendant — a bad actor,” he says. 

While waiting for their settlement checks — which should be disbursed in a matter of weeks — students might take another measure of small solace from a different legal action: a petition filed recently by John L. Mucci, the longtime Wright officer who was the school’s president when it went belly-up.

Mucci asked the court to amend his divorce agreement to free him from paying spousal support to his former wife. The designated amount — $3,630 a month — was affordable back in 2011, when Wright was paying him a monthly salary of about $25,000, Mucci argues in the petition. But now he finds himself out of work and unemployable — just like many of his former students. His ex-wife, meanwhile, has a good-paying job with the Federation for American Immigration Reform — an extremist anti-immigrant group known as FAIR. (Add an online payday lender to the family portrait and we’d have an exploitation trifecta.)

Mucci’s petition paints a portrait of woe. “The closing of the schools and the bankruptcy filing have garnered substantial negative coverage in the media, which has negatively impacted his [Mucci’s] ability to obtain employment,” it states. Compounding the ex-president’s blues, it seems that Wright, in the confusion surrounding its bankruptcy filing, neglected to submit a required periodic audit to the U.S. Department of Education. That error, according to Mucci, bars him from seeking employment with other college-level education institutions that receive similar federal funds.

“Petitioner’s employment options are also limited because his knowledge, skills and abilities are germane to post-secondary educational management — an occupational field that he cannot pursue,” his court filing states.

Mucci is pushing 70, but it’s never too late to consider a career change. Maybe something like surgical technology, a field that Wright Career College marketed as a great opportunity for its students.

Before Mucci enrolls, though, he might want to have a chat with Brian Wroten, who saw Wright’s television ads as he was recovering at home from cancer treatment. Wroten had received an encouraging prognosis, engendering in him good feelings about the medical profession. A certified electrician who had also worked in sales, Wroten was looking for something different. He signed up for $32,000 worth of loans and started classes. Yes, Wroten ignored several red flags about Wright’s aggressive recruiting, but Wright’s admissions counselors had told him that someone with his skills and credentials could easily find a medical-technician job. His starting salary, they told him, would be in the $60,000–$70,000 range, and he could expect to parlay that into a six-figure income in a short time.

Wroten knew almost immediately that he’d made a costly error. Most of his fellow students, he tells me, lacked college-level skills: Many couldn’t write legibly or do basic math. The instruction, he says, was subpar. And Wroten learned only after he was on the hook that a good starting salary for a surgical technician in this area is about $40,000 — barely enough to keep his student loans current.

Still, Wroten resolved to stick it out. “I thought: If I can get out of here at the top of the class, I can still get a good job and I’ll be all right,” he says. Toward the end of his training, he insisted on being placed in an “externship,” for on-site training. He was one of the few in his class to be accepted to train at a Kansas City hospital, but the experience was a disaster. 

“I quickly found out that what I learned at Wright was not enough to keep up in this field,” Wroten says. The hospital asked him to leave.

Once he’d completed his course, Wroten answered every ad he could find for work as a surgical technician. “I learned that putting Wright on my résumé was wrong,” he said. 

Married and the father of a 6-year-old son, Wroten has started a handyman business and says he is fortunate to have enough financial cushion to survive the debacle of Wright Career College, which he calls “the biggest mistake of my life.” He knows many of his former classmates are not so lucky.

Unlike the multitude of for-profit schools that follow a similar exploitive model, Wright was established as a nonprofit corporation. But the school was certainly profitable for its leaders. The 2014 tax returns of its corporate owner, Mission Group Kansas Inc., show that the chairman, James Miller Jr. of Naples, Florida, took compensation totaling $743,295 from Wright Career College and “related organizations.” Miller’s wife, Gayle Miller, earned $122,283 as a director for Mission Group Kansas and for work with “related organizations.” Mucci’s total compensation that year was $241,719. 

Wright reported almost $34 million in revenues in 2014, but almost $38 million in expenses. Financial data for 2015 — the year preceding Mission Group Kansas’ bankruptcy — is not publicly available. Attempts to reach Mucci and Miller were unsuccessful.

Humphrey, Farrington & McClain began assembling its lawsuit in 2014, alleging that the school “entices prospective students to enroll and apply for student loans they cannot pay back through a systematic, deceptive marketing scheme.” That charge pretty much summarizes the business plan of much of the profit-seeking college sector. Members of Congress, state attorneys general and regulators from the U.S. Department of Education have known about its scams for years but never mustered the political will to step forward. Instead, students have been forced to hire lawyers to have any hope of justice — assuming their state legislatures didn’t block their path to legal action, as Missouri Senate President Ron Richard and other unscrupulous lawmakers attempted this year. 

Humphrey, Farrington & McClain continues to receive calls from ex-students who tell of garnished paychecks, eviction threats and looming homelessness as they struggle with tens of thousands of dollars of student debt incurred while attending as little as a single semester at Wright Career College. Meanwhile, Mucci, ex–college president and cash-poor ex-husband, lists as his address a gated townhouse and apartment community in Johnson County. Miller, the kingpin of the five-campus empire, has disconnected his Florida telephone number.

I mention Mucci’s reportedly diminished circumstances to Wroten, and he responds with a bitter laugh. “Oh, that’s too bad,” he says. “Join the crowd. I’d love to stand behind him in the unemployment line.”