Reported by NPR:
The University of Phoenix is paying a record $191 million to settle a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission accusing the for-profit university of using deceptive ads to lure students with the promise of future job opportunities with large companies such as AT&T, Adobe, Twitter, Microsoft and Yahoo.
The settlement includes a plan to cancel $141 million in student debts that are owed to the school by people who enrolled from October 2012 through the end of 2016 – the period in which the FTC says prospective students might have been duped.
Court documents establishing the settlement give the University of Phoenix and its parent company, Apollo Education Group, 15 business days to send an email and letter to eligible students, informing them that they're covered by the agreement.
By the way, there is no University of Phoenix in Phoenix.
The University of Phoenix successfully targeted minorities, military veterans, service members and their spouses for enrollment, the FTC says, calling the University of Phoenix "the largest recipient of Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits since the program's inception."
"The University of Phoenix once claimed nearly half a million students," NPR education correspondent Anya Kamenetz reports, "but enrollment has fallen sharply in the last decade amid several investigations, lawsuits and controversies."
Article specifies that current enrollment was below 100,000 in 2018.
Now all those students will have to go here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @08:01PM
The point being that they engaged in the advertising and tactics that they were actively cooperating with businesses and that a degree from there was an inside track to get a job at those companies happened during that period. That they work with major corporations to help shape the curriculum is no secret - they were doing that when I attended there in the 90s, too. But they didn't imply that you would therefore get a job there.