Anamarc College — A Family-Run Career School Felled by an Embezzlement at Home

Summary

Anamarc College was a small, family-owned for-profit career school on the U.S.–Mexico border, opened in El Paso, Texas, in April 2000 and shut down abruptly in the first days of July 2014. It trained working adults — overwhelmingly Hispanic, many of them the first in their families to attempt a credential — for entry-level jobs in allied health: medical assistants, medical billers and coders, phlebotomy and nursing-assistant technicians, and, on its most ambitious track, vocational and registered nurses. Across three campuses, two in El Paso and one across the state line in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, it served roughly 700 students at its height. When it closed, it did so the way the worst closures do: with no warning, no teach-out worthy of the name, and bounced paychecks for the people who taught there.

Anamarc was not one of the publicly traded national chains that defined the for-profit scandal era. It was a mom-and-pop operation, owned and run by Ana Maria Piña Houde and her husband Marc Houde, whose surname the school's name compresses. That intimacy is the whole of the story. The institution lived on federal Title IV aid, like nearly all of its peers, and its students' median graduate debt was modest by the standards of the sector. What killed it was not a regulator's hand on the aid spigot but money disappearing from inside the family business: in the summer of 2014 the FBI raided two of the El Paso campuses and the owners' home in the Upper Valley, and a civil suit later accused the owner's own sister and brother-in-law of embezzling more than 450,000 dollars from the school.

The closure was administered, in the end, by the accreditor. The Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS) gave Anamarc a deadline of July 11, 2014, to do right by its students — issue refunds, let those near completion finish, or arrange transfers. The college could do almost none of it. Students who had paid roughly 30,000 dollars toward a nursing degree were told to gather their things and leave; many were refused transcripts; most were told their credits would not transfer. Yvonne Mendez, six months from a registered-nursing degree at the Santa Teresa campus, walked into class one summer day and found chaos instead of instruction.

What Anamarc left behind is a smaller, sadder version of the for-profit cautionary tale — not fraud engineered at scale, but a school that strangers' money kept aloft and a family's alleged theft brought down, with hundreds of border-region students absorbing the loss. The campuses are gone; the lawsuit settled quietly; the federal investigation was never publicly resolved.

Timeline

A School Built on the Border, and on a Family

Anamarc College opened in April 2000 into a real and underserved market. El Paso and its sister communities along the New Mexico line form one of the largest majority-Hispanic metropolitan areas in the United States, a place with persistent need for allied-health workers and a population for whom a fast, local, job-focused credential could be transformative. Anamarc set out to meet that need directly: short diploma programs in medical assisting, medical billing and coding, phlebotomy, and nursing-assistant work, the kind of training that could move a working adult into a clinic or a hospital billing office in a year or less. Ninety-five percent of its students were minority, the overwhelming majority Hispanic — a figure well above even the high Texas average.

In its best years the school did the thing it promised. Reported completion rates ran near 76 percent, and the median debt its graduates carried — under 9,000 dollars — was a fraction of what students at the national for-profit chains were saddled with. Anamarc grew to three campuses, two in El Paso and one in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and added associate degrees in business management and in nursing, reaching for the most valuable credential it could legitimately offer: the registered-nursing pathway that drew students like Yvonne Mendez, who enrolled with the expectation of becoming an RN.

But the school's structure was also its vulnerability. Anamarc was not a chain with a corporate parent, a board, or reserves; it was a closely held family business, named for its founders, run by a husband and wife. Like nearly every institution in its sector, it lived on federal Title IV aid — the grants and loans its students brought through the door. A school that small, funded that way, with no endowment and no cushion, has no margin for a shock. When the shock came, it came not from the market or the regulator but from inside the family.

The Money That Went Missing

The proximate cause of Anamarc's collapse was an alleged theft. In the summer of 2014, as the school's finances buckled, the FBI raided two of its El Paso campuses and the owners' home in the Upper Valley. The owners would later allege, in a civil suit, that Ana Maria Houde's own sister and brother-in-law had embezzled more than 450,000 dollars from the business — a sum that, for an operation of Anamarc's size, was not a rounding error but a mortal wound. The federal investigation that began with the raids was never publicly resolved; the FBI did not report on it again. The civil suit, by contrast, ended in October 2015 with a quiet settlement in which the relatives agreed to repay a portion of the missing money.

Ana Maria Houde's own account of the crisis was gentler than the facts. She described the school as suffering "temporary cash flow issues" even as she filed for bankruptcy and the doors closed for good. Whatever the precise mix of alleged theft and accumulated financial trouble — observers noted the problems went back years — the result was an institution that could not make payroll. Instructors received termination letters; some had gone weeks without pay; checks bounced. A school that cannot pay its teachers cannot teach, and a school that has filed for bankruptcy cannot fund a teach-out for the students it leaves behind.

The cruelty of this kind of closure is that it punishes the people furthest from the wrongdoing. Whatever happened inside the Houde family, it was the students who paid — students who had handed over their federal aid and, in the nursing track, as much as 30,000 dollars on the promise of a license and a career.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For the students, the aftermath was the familiar grind of a sudden closure. The roughly 339 enrolled at the end scattered, many denied the transcripts that might have let them continue elsewhere and most told their credits were worthless to other institutions. Federal borrowers were eligible for closed-school loan discharge — the provision that erases the debt of students whose school shuts down before they finish — which could at least clear the federal balances of those who qualified. But discharge does not return the months or years invested, nor does it confer the nursing license or the billing-and-coding job the students had enrolled to earn. The near-graduates' fight to sit for state exams had no clean resolution.

For the faculty and staff, the end was abrupt and unpaid: termination letters, weeks of withheld wages, bounced checks. For the family at the center, the reckoning was partial. The federal investigation opened by the 2014 FBI raids was never publicly closed. The civil embezzlement suit settled in October 2015, with the accused relatives agreeing to repay only a portion of the more than 450,000 dollars at issue — money that, in any case, came too late to reopen the school or refund a single student. The campuses on Dyer Street and across the line in Santa Teresa passed out of educational use. What remains is a case study in how a school small enough to be run from a family's kitchen table can be emptied from the same table.

Lessons

References

• Anamarc College (TX) Closes College History Garden
• El Paso's Anamarc College Closes — Fires Teachers, Cancels Classes KISS-FM El Paso
• Anamarc embezzlement lawsuit settled KFOX-14 / El Paso Times
• Anamarc College-El Paso Central (Closed 2014) Community College Review