AIMC Closure: Part 1

On 7/28/2026, AIMC President David Lee announced in an email that AIMC would be closing. The closure was in response to the school having received a Financial Responsibility Composite Score (FRCS) of 0.9. If you don’t know what a FRCS is, check out Ryan Hofer’s explanation of that here. The highest score a school can receive is a 3.0. A score below 1.0 means the school has not been financially responsible.

Regardless of the poor score, just like all other acupuncture colleges, incoming students (and those who do not qualify for the legacy provision) will be facing a loss of GradPlus loans this Fall 2026 with additional direct loan caps of $20,500 per year (and an aggregate limit of $100,000 for borrowing). Starting July 1, 2026, educational programs are now subject to a new accountability formula… Programs that fail this test in 2 out of 3 years will lose federal student loan eligibility. Most acupuncture schools will lose complete access to direct loans by 2028, due to the failure of their graduate students to earn more than general bachelors degree holders at the fourth year out of schools. Please see the Oregon town hall that we presented on this earlier this year for more information.

The director of AIMC stated: ““With the completion of public comment this July 1 and the preliminary data that we received… I do not see a path forward with the inevitable termination of federal financial aid for almost all of the Chinese Medicine programs,” and this is resulting in the closure this year of all AIMC programs, which is devastating for students currently enrolled there.

On August 6th, AIMC presented the options for their current students, none of which are going to make anybody very happy. The teach-out proposals from AIMC include:

1. Virginia University of Integrative Medicine (VUIM) with a signed teach-out agreement starting September 1 in Austin, TX. Unfortunately, this isn’t a real option for most students who need to be licensed in California, because VUIM is not a California Acupuncture Board (CAB) approved program. See more about this in the next part.

2. A very sketchy option: a school called Oikos University in Berkeley that isn’t accredited yet, though it has been approved by CAB. It’s also not eligible for Title IV funding. See more about this in the next part.

Alternatively, students could attempt a transfer to one of the schools AIMC has named: Academy of Chinese Culture and Health Sciences (ACCHS) in Oakland, Five Branches University in San Jose or Yosan University in Los Angeles.

AIMC itself is requesting a 120-day Title IV extension from the Department of Education (citing 34 CFR §668.26(e)) to run a “final teach-out term” using its own accreditation. For now, Austin AIMC closes Aug 31and students not needing a CAB-approved program could theoretically move seamlessly into VUIM in September.

AIMC Berkeley closes at the end of December, meaning students in Berkeley can continue the Fall semester at AIMC (accessing legacy GradPlus if eligible for that). The idea is that Oikos will take over the physical lease and prepare to become the operating entity going forward. Students who can finish by December stay under AIMC’s own accreditation the whole time, no transfer needed. Students who can’t finish by December face the actual transfer decision (to Oikos or elsewhere) at that point.

VUIM taking custodian-of-records role for AIMC Berkeley, OCOM, and AOMA

I’m going to continue this in a Part B so that it’s not too much to swallow in one post. Stay tuned.