Critic Reviews

It’s an appalling, infuriating story.

It’s a lot to take in, and Fail State doesn’t leave the viewer with a lot of hope. When the Obama Administration figured out how to grade such operations and shut down the ones plainly set up to fail their students, Corinthian, Everest, ITT Tech and DeVry went away.

It gives the feature doc treatment to a topic TV journalists (and news-comedy hero John Oliver) have looked at over the decades — showing the slimy ways that reforms prompted by public outrage have been neutered by politicians on both sides of the aisle.

The film’s disparate elements add up to less than the sum of its parts, and this would-be fiery take on the failures of the American higher-education system never really ignites.

The ham-fisted approach undercuts the valuable information that makes up Fail State.