By The Editors

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (E.E.O.C.) has sued the Kaplan Higher Education Corporation, charging that it has used credit history reports to discriminate against black job applicants.

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Cleveland last month, asserts that information in credit histories is often inaccurate and not a good indicator of a person’s ability to do a particular job. Its lawsuit claims that Kaplan’s use of the practice since at least early 2008 has had a “significant disparate impact” on black applicants for positions with the company in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title VII prohibits discrimination in hiring on account of race among several other categories.

Kaplan has denied the charges, stating that its use of credit histories “are job-related and a necessity for our organization to ensure that staff handling financial matters, including financial aid, are properly screened.”

The company, a subsidiary of the Washington Post Company, rose to prominence in the 1990s publishing materials and offering classes to prepare students to take examinations for college and graduate and professional school. It has since also become a leading company in the field of for-profit post-secondary educational colleges and training schools.

E.E.O.C. officials said the suit against Kaplan is just the third time it has sued a company over misusing credit reports in employment; and its taking on such a highly-visible company clearly marks a ratcheting up of the debate about whether the practice has enabled companies to conceal using applicants’ credit histories to conceal discrimination. Assertions that it has have grown more numerous in recent years as the crisis of joblessness has spread and the unemployment rate for blacks as a whole and even for blacks who are college graduates has remained nearly twice that of their white counterparts.

Separately, the federal agency said this week that it had received more than 99,000 complaints of private-sector job bias of jobs bias in fiscal year 2010, a record. The filing of complaints, however, doesn’t mean the agency will find all of them credible or that those it does find credible will lead to lawsuits. In fact, only a small number of complaints reach that stage. For example, the agency said that in the last fiscal year it had filed 250 lawsuits, resolved 285 lawsuits and resolved 104,999 private sector charges of discrimination.