Crown College owner John Wabel said that even though he hopes to reopen the school, he and his staff are working to find other institutions where more than 100 Crown students can finish their degrees since the school lost its national accreditation two weeks ago.

“That is the only thing that mattered to us then, and it’s all that matters now,” Wabel said this week.

The Tacoma storefront for-profit school offers five degrees, including two bachelor’s degrees, and caters largely to students who want to take courses online. Two-thirds of its students live out of state.

There aren’t many options for Crown students if they can’t finish their degrees. Those receiving federal financial aid alternately could ask the U.S. Department of Education to discharge their loans.

Several students have sued Crown in recent years, saying that their credits didn’t transfer to other schools although Crown had told them they would. The school settled two lawsuits and lost one in court. Two similar lawsuits against the school are pending.

Wabel said he believes he has an agreement with Herzing College in Wisconsin to accept the students.

Takeisha Bartels, a Virginia mother and military wife, doesn’t like that option.

Bartels said she’s been going to Crown for almost four years and was going to complete a bachelor’s in business in the spring.

“Herzing is only going to take half my credits and told me I had to go to school for another two years,” she said. “That would make me go to school for about six years. That’s crazy.”

Bartels said she already has borrowed $37,000 and would have to borrow thousands more to finish her degree at Herzing, where she says she’d pay $375 per credit instead of Crown’s $250 per credit.

Michale McComis, the associate executive director of the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology, said Crown lost its accreditation in part because its students weren’t getting jobs at the rate they should.

“The expectation is that students will receive an education and that they are able to compete and then be able to find employment,” McComis said.

The commission, a private nonprofit independent accrediting agency headquartered in Virginia, requires that 70 percent of graduates be able to find jobs, and has varying graduation requirements depending on the programs.

Wabel said two of the school’s programs were producing graduates who found jobs 63 percent and 58 percent of the time.

He lamented that instead of helping to fix the problem, the accrediting board was shutting the school down.

McComis said it was impossible to tell from the records Crown submitted whether students were finishing programs at acceptable rates.

“All I can really say is we were not able to reconcile the information they had given to us,” he said.

The commission accredits about 780 schools nationwide and revokes several accreditations each year, McComis said.

Crown would have to wait nine months before trying to become accredited again.

It could operate without the accreditation, although students wouldn’t be able to use federal financial aid there anymore. To continue without the accreditation, Crown would have to apply for authorization through the Higher Education Coordinating Board, a state agency.

Wabel said he hopes the college will still operate after a brief closure.

“We’ll regroup,” he said. “These are degrees that are equal to or better than any degree in the United States.”

Crown, which Wabel started operating in 1990 as a school for corrections officers, has offered associate’s and bachelor’s degree programs in criminal justice, paralegal studies, business and public administration. The degrees were offered both online and “in residence.”

Wabel said Crown – if not the only school in the nation to offer every single class online, one of just a few – has been a “round peg in a square hole.” He said Crown has been so innovative in the ways it offers courses that it doesn’t fit the regulations.

Bartels, who lives in Yorktown, Va., hopes Crown pulls through somehow and she can finish her degree with them. She said professors there taught her about business and she was able to start an online company selling adult novelties and lingerie.

“A lot of things I didn’t know about how to run a business, I know now,” she said.

It’s been “most definitely” a good education, Bartels said.

Joanne Black, who sued Crown in 2005 and won, said students who haven’t graduated from Crown might actually be in a better situation than many students who graduated from there, because they can still get financial aid and start their education over as long as they don’t have degrees yet.

When Black said she realized her Crown education in paralegal studies wasn’t going to land her a job, she started the paralegal program at Edmonds Community College. She said she learned as much in one introduction class at Edmonds as she’d learned in nearly two years at Crown.

Karen Hucks: 253-597-8660

karen.hucks@thenewstribune.com