The college’s former president is among those charged with theft and other crimes.
Department of Education
Three individuals have been indicted for allegedly stealing $20 million in Pell Grant and other public funds intended to benefit the students of Eastern Gateway Community College, which closed in 2024. Keith Faber, the state auditor for Ohio, announced the indictment in a press conference Thursday, where he was joined by Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent.
The alleged thieves are Michael Perik, who co-owned Student Resource Center, the company that administered the college’s free tuition program; Nicole Rowe Colclasure, president and part owner of SRC; and Michael Geoghegan, the college’s president and CFO.
According to Faber, the defendants disbursed Pell Grants to ineligible students, resulting in millions of dollars being improperly paid to Perik and Colclasure’s company. The defendants were also indicted for bribery and tampering with records, which Faber said was because they allegedly altered institutional documents in an attempt to cover up their crimes. The indicted crimes took place between 2017 and 2022, during which time EGCC’s enrollment rose from approximately 8,500 students to over 60,000, the vast majority of whom took all their courses online.
Ohio lawmakers began raising the alarm about EGCC’s free college program, which was targeted at members of unions and their families, soon after its 2015 launch, questioning when out-of-state students were benefiting from free education at a public community college; Inside Higher Ed first documented criticisms of SRC’s relationship with the college in 2021. In 2022, the college’s accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, began investigating the program, and the following year, the Department of Education also started looking into its use of Pell funds.
