The owners of shuttered for-profit Hussian College have sued the school’s former president and CEO, Jeremiah Staropoli, seeking $162 million in damages and penalties and claiming that Staropoli and close associates in the company embezzled funds and then conspired to cover up the alleged misdeeds.
On September 5, father-and-son Hussian owners David and Joshua Figuli
sued Staropoli, other former Hussian employees, and two lending companies in Pennsylvania state court, alleging a racketeering conspiracy, fraud, embezzlement, and other abuses. The lending companies, contending there was a basis for federal court jurisdiction, removed the case from the state court to the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia.
While the companies and some of the former employees have filed answers to the complaint or moved to dismiss the case, Staropoli has not responded. In a recent court filing, the Figulis say they have tried to serve Staropoli with the complaint seven times and that Staropoli “appears to be evading service.”
Staropoli did not respond to a request for comment from Republic Report. The Figuli’s attorney also did not respond.
The Hussian closureHussian College, founded in Philadelphia in 1946,
closed in summer 2023. At the time it shut down, Hussian had hundreds of students at campuses in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, and California, plus online offerings, and taught programs in business, information technology, criminal justice, health sciences, and the arts. Hussian, in 2018, had expanded by taking over Tennessee-based for-profit
Daymar College, a school that had in 2015 agreed to a $12.4 million settlement to end a lawsuit, alleging deceptive practices, brought by Kentucky’s attorney general.
For academic year 2021-22, the last year for which the U.S. Department of Education published data on the school, Hussian received $14.8 million in federal student aid dollars from the Department — about 74 percent of the school’s revenue.
In June 2022, accrediting agency
ACCSC, the gatekeeper for the schools’ eligibility for federal student grants and loans, had put all the Hussian and Daymar campuses on
system-wide warning, citing concerns about student achievement at the schools. But ACCSC
removed the warning and renewed Hussian’s accreditation in December 2022.
The Figulis announced the closure in June 2023, two weeks after Joshua Figuli informed Hussian students
by email that the school’s board of directors had replaced Staropoli because it had “lost confidence in his leadership.” Figuli wrote in a
separate email to faculty and staff that a “gut-wrenching process of discovery” had produced “shockingly revealing” information about the state of the school under Staropoli.
Around the time of the announced closure, more than 15 Hussian faculty, staff, students, and parents spoke with Republic Report. They told me that Hussian repeatedly had been pressed by vendors for extended and blatant failures to pay its bills, that students had not been receiving federal aid disbursements in a timely manner, that Hussian owed money to many students, and that Hussian was enrolling new students even as it was about to close.
One Hussian employee at the time reported to me evidence of financial misconduct, improper expenses, and computer access manipulation by Staropoli. The employee also said that Joshua Figuli, who stepped in as CEO when Staropoli was dismissed, was failing to respond to calls and emails from students and staff who were trying to find out what was going on.
The lawsuit’s allegationsThe lawsuit filed in September by the Figulis places the blame for Hussian’s collapse squarely on Staropoli, who joined Hussian as CEO in 2017, and a group of employees he brought in. The Figulis admit to knowing that Staropoli had past ties to some of these employees, but they claim the ties turned out to be much deeper than Staropoli told them, including, they allege, one employee engaged, before and after being hired, in an apparent romantic relationship with Staropoli. The Figulis allege that Staropoli caused Hussian to pay large and unwarranted bonuses to these favored employees, and even allowed one of them to work for Hussian while remaining on the payroll of a competitor school.
The Figulis also allege that Staropoli conspired with the two lending companies to make deals behind their backs and that Staropoli created fake email addresses for the Figulis so that he, not they, would receive confirmation of the deals.
The Figulis say that under Staropoli’s leadership, Hussian was failing to return to the government millions in unearned federal and state student aid, as required by law, and that Staropoli was concealing from them the schools’ “dire state of cash flow” and its failure, also, to transmit hundreds of thousands owed to students.
And they allege that school money was used to pay for Staropoli’s family and friends to vacation in Orlando and Nashville; for charges from Staropoli’s country club in Delaware; for tuition payments to Drexel University for one of the favored employees, despite that same employee ending Hussian’s tuition reimbursement policy; for “nondescript transfers to VENMO”; and more.
The Figulis claim that the alleged improper actions of Staropoli and other defendants induced them “to provide loans, advance costs, provide capital infusions, forego collections, and execute guarantees that summed to total direct losses in excess of $6,948,110.93.”
The two lending companies have moved to dismiss the case, one former employee has done the same, and another former employee filed an answer to the complaint. But former employee Steven Wojslaw, according to a filing by the Figulis, was served but has not filed any response.
Wojslaw filed his own lawsuit against Hussian in 2022, after he apparently put his own money into the company. When he was terminated, he sued to get the money back. That case was settled. Meanwhile, Velocity Capital Group, one of the lenders the Figulis have now sued, filed last year its own lawsuit in New York against Hussian and the Figulis, seeking its investment back. The Figulis have filed a counterclaim in that lawsuit.
In their new case against Starapoli, Velocity, and the others, the Figulis filed a motion on December 2 seeking permission to amend their original complaint to clarify, add, and withdraw certain claims, in part to respond to the motions to dismiss.
Who is Jeremiah Staropoli?A former employee says information that the company learned around the time the Figulis forced out Staropoli came as “a giant shock” to the company. “It was insane,” this ex-employee says. “There were multiple victims: the Figulis, but also the staff, the students, and the government.” The ex-employee asks, “Why don’t people go to prison” when they “destroy so many lives?” This employee says that, as the school struggled, many employees believed the Figulis were the enemy, who wouldn’t invest enough money and time “to help Staropoli save the company,” but that the facts in the new lawsuit tell a different story.
Jeremiah Staropoli is a former president of the Towson, Maryland, campus of
Brightwood College, a for-profit chain owned by now-collapsed
Education Corporation of America. He also previously worked for the for-profit college operations Kaplan and DeVry. According to his
LinkedIn page, he also was previously president of the Kentucky-based
The Keeling Group, an IT consulting firm “specializing in custom software development, cloud consulting, network integration and higher education regulatory compliance solutions.”
Staropoli also was once listed as part of the management team of a fledgling coding bootcamp operation owned by the Figulis called
AcademicIQ, but that business apparently never took off. Hussian College and AcademicIQ shared an address on Spring Garden Street in Philadelphia, along with a campus of non-profit Harrisburg University.
David Figuli until recently served on the Harrisburg University
board of trustees.
Hussian also has a connection to Colbeck Capital Management,
slippery operators of campuses of the Art Institutes (now closed)
and South University (still open) that were acquired in the wake of the
collapse of Dream Center Education Holdings. Hussian acquired the Los Angeles-based Studio School, in which Colbeck had been an investor, and
renamed the school Hussian College Los Angeles; Staropoli
told me in 2019 that Colbeck-backed Studio Enterprise remained “a service provider” to the school.
The mess at Hussian seems to be just the latest example of how the federal investment in for-profit colleges
often ends up as waste, fraud, and abuse — with taxpayers ripped off, students locked out in the cold, and some for-profit executives walking away with cash and fancy perqs. The for-profit college industry, recalling the lax enforcement in the first Trump term under Secretary of Education Betsy Devos, is
salivating at the impending restoration of the leader of scam Trump University as leader of the United States. But, if it has any integrity at all, the new department that Elon Musk is supposedly setting up for Trump — committed to rooting out federal government waste, fraud, and abuse — should
investigate this industry promptly.
