A recent investigation by the Arizona Republic found a number of students at the University of Arizona Global Campus say they were taken advantage of. The complaints range from being misled about the value of their degrees to the cost of their education.
The UA bought Ashford University in 2020 and rebranded it as the University of Arizona Global Campus; prior to the deal, Ashford had been sued over allegations of using deceptive tactics to recruit students.
This isn’t the only school where students have alleged these kinds of things have happened. Michael Vasquez is the senior investigative reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and has reported on this.
He spoke with The Show — starting with how prevalent it is that universities partner with for-profit companies to provide their online programs.
Full conversation
MICHAEL VASQUEZ: This is a growing and very murky part of American higher education. The, the whole online learning boom, which dates back to the George W. Bush administration, was led by for-profit colleges. Many of them publicly traded on Wall Street and they did get it down to a science to a certain extent, certain aspects of that business, whether it be the recruitment of students or creating interactive online teaching platforms.
And so now, as public institutions or nonprofit traditional colleges have tried to branch out into the online space and recruit more online students. In many cases, they are partnering with these for-profit companies with the argument being that those companies are more experienced in this area.
MARK BRODIE: So are these companies exclusively in the recruitment business? Like do they do anything else?
VASQUEZ: For example, once the students sign up to take these online classes, it can vary company by company. In many cases, these companies specialize in student recruitment. And that is probably the big lure when you have large public institutions partnering with these, these online for profit companies.
What in many cases attracts the traditional colleges to enter into these partnerships is they assume perhaps correctly, perhaps incorrectly that these for-profit companies are better at finding students and convincing them to sign up.
The problem is that while these companies may have a strong record of finding and recruiting students, the methods that they have often used have been sometimes unethical, sometimes you could argue immoral frankly and, and predatory. And so if you have the University of Arizona or any other institution with a generally good reputation, you sometimes wonder, who exactly are they getting into business with here?
BRODIE: Well, so let's talk about some of the ways that these companies can recruit students. I mean, you mentioned that they are in some cases, unethical or predatory, like, what kinds of things do they do?
VASQUEZ: There are two or three main areas where things can go horribly wrong at the recruitment phase. And I've spoken over the years with many, many students who enrolled in online programs sometimes run by for profit, you know, operators.
Sometimes these online programs are a partnership between, you know, traditional college and a for profit company. But what often happens when, when you talk to students who ended up for the worse for the experienced and you, you try to figure out what was the problem here. There's a couple of crucial areas.
Students often if they are unhappy and they feel they were misled, they will complain about misunderstandings or outright lies that were told to them about how much is this gonna cost. I've spoken to students time and time again who were told sometimes that there won't be any loans at all on top of just the financial cost.
One of the other areas that students complain about is what their employability will be after they complete the program and how it is so easy to mislead students about the value of a degree and the employability of graduates.
And the, the last piece of it that I'll say in terms of the deception and how the deception works is related to accreditation, that you have many, many career tracks, many programs where if you go to college to get an associates to get a bachelor's degree in a particular field, in many cases, you need a certain specific accreditation to be employable after you graduate. So a college can say to a prospective student, they can say, hey, we are accredited by the higher learning commission or some other broad accreditor that really just reviews the institution overall.
And so that might, the, the student thinks, OK, well, this is an accredited college. I'm safe to go here. But what a student does not know is, let's say you want to be a nutritionist, let's say you want to be a physical therapist. There are specific programmatic accreditations that you need to get as a student, you need to attend a program that is programmatically approved by these entities that specialize in physical therapy or in nutrition or it, there just all sorts of careers. And if they don't have that, you can spend four or five years getting a degree that is arguably worthless.
BRODIE: For students who fall into these categories, do they have recourse either with the online companies or with the, the nonprofit universities that are working with them?
VASQUEZ: Not to say in many cases, the student complaints are ignored or they are filed away in some shelf somewhere. But it is really, really hard for students to get justice. There have been some students who have benefited from loan forgiveness ,which can be administered by the federal government, so that there is a, a provision within federal law, that states that if, if a student is deceived, if there is evidence of, you know, unsavory practices and, and the federal government has its kind of standards for, you know, to prove that you were defrauded by your college.
But if you can prove you were defrauded by your college, there is an avenue to get loan forgiveness. That can take many, many years. And in, in numerous cases, students who were ripped off don't qualify because it's not only getting ripped off, but then you have to prove that you were ripped off.
BRODIE: What have these for profit companies said about all this and what have nonprofit colleges said about their continued relationships with them?
VASQUEZ: It's a very tricky thing because I think sometimes the, the debate about this topic when we talk about online education and we, and we talk about for-profit education in those two areas, very much overlap. Sometimes the industry when it defends itself, it will make the argument that, you know, how can you paint with such a broad brush? You can't say every college is going to be, you know, predatory just because of its tax status just because it's a for profit institution. And that is true.
But realistically, if you have a situation where out of X number of companies, a third or a half or whatever the percentage might be. If, if there's a huge percentage of companies who are getting into legal trouble, who are paying, you know, multimillion dollar legal settlements for predatory practices. I think the obvious issue in front of us is that there's something going on here.
BRODIE: Given all of this that's been coming out and student complaints and all does it seem as though nonprofit universities are starting to rethink working with these kinds of companies?
VASQUEZ: There's a fork in the road and if we're not there, I think we're, we're fast approaching that, this moment where colleges that consider these kinds of partnerships, if you, if you have a, a state institution, if you have a traditional not for profit kind of residential college, and they consider these partnerships, there have been enough scandals and enough places where the faculty are gonna ask some tough questions.
And so I don't know if, if these partnerships disappear, but it's gonna be a lot harder going forward for colleges to do this easily to sort of, you know, just get this approved by their, their governing board without any kind of pushback because at best, the track record of these partnerships is mixed.
