As graduation from Ashford University approached in 2020, a bountiful new chapter of life was opening for the 34-year-old mother of two, she thought.
She was wrong.
The new chapter became hell for the battered but resilient U.S. Armed Forces veteran.
She was duped by her own alma mater and too disgusted to even attend a virtual graduation ceremony in October 2020. After all, the university was holding her diploma for ransom, she felt.
For Lee, it was nothing new.
“They were constantly harassing me,” she said.
The for-profit university in San Diego, overseen by a company in metro Phoenix, has been the subject of legal scrutiny since Lee was a teenager.
The institution lost its final lawsuit this month as Ashford University. It's now a part of the University of Arizona's new Global Campus, which is based near East Chandler Boulevard and South Arizona Avenue.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta lodged charges of fraud against the university managed by Chandler-based education services company Zovio, Inc., in 2017.
Ashford denied the fraud charges and called the case a political hit job.
"The company emphatically denies the allegations that it ever deliberately misled its students, falsely advertised its programs, or in any way was not fully accurate in its statements to investors," Zovio said in a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The trial didn’t conclude until two weeks ago.
“[Students] deserve more than empty promises and mounting debt, yet that is all that Ashford University had to offer them,” Bonta said. “I’m committed to fighting for the students defrauded by this predatory for-profit college and its parent company.”
San Diego County Superior Court Judge Eddie C. Sturgeon ruled this month that Ashford University and Zovio were culpable for “giving students false information about career outcomes, pace of degree programs, and transfer credits, in order to entice them to enroll at Ashford,” according to the decision.
The defendants were ordered to pay back more than $22 million to students all over the country like Lee, an Idaho native who lives in Indian Land, South Carolina, a suburb of Charlotte.
While Bonta litigated his case against the fraudulent school, the University of Arizona swooped in and acquired Ashford University in 2020 for just $1.
Zovio, in its deal with UAGC, was to pay the school $225 million over 15 years, including $37.5 million as an upfront payment. It also gave the Valley-based company the reins to most day-to-day university operations like recruiting, IT, and academic support services.
In December 2020, Ashford University became the University of Arizona Global Campus.
“In addition to Zovio’s investment, UAGC has dedicated resources of its own to ensure Zovio’s increased compliance efforts are not only in place, but are effective,” spokesperson Linda Robertson promised.
Now, Arizona taxpayers are footing the bill to keep the school alive.
“It is essentially the same school,” Lee said.
With Zovio at the helm, things aren’t getting much better for students at the University of Arizona Global Campus. It is affiliated with the University of Arizona but operates independently under its own board of directors and president.
Despite the rebrand, “Zovio continues to provide the same misleading enrollment and marketing services to the University of Arizona Global Campus as it previously provided to Ashford,” Bonta said in a statement.
But Judge Sturgeon said Zovio has “dedicated significant time and efforts in creating a compliance program to detect and prevent fake and misleading statements.”
The university agrees.
“It’s a new day at Zovio with new leadership and the No. 1 priority for both Zovio and UAGC is doing right by our students,” Robertson said.
Online college and military-affiliated students go together like peanut butter and jelly.
The stress and unpredictability of service life, coupled with family obligations and schedule limitations, makes going to school online an attractive option for service members interested in balancing an academic or trade degree with a stint in the military.
That rings especially true for Lee, a disabled U.S. Air Force veteran battling post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Going to school was my only option,” she said.
That’s why Lee decided to enroll at Ashford University. Injured in the line of duty and struggling with her mental health, she felt it was time to hang up the battle gear and start a career in law enforcement administration.
Veterans rely on bravery and decisiveness in combat, but displays of vulnerability are often frowned upon. Back in peacetime civilian life, veterans can be consumed with vulnerability, according to the Pew Research Center, however.
“Veterans are targeted by predatory schools,” said Jennifer Esparza, the legal affairs director for Washington, D.C.-based bipartisan nonprofit Veterans Education Success, which referred more than 100 whistleblowers to Bonta for the recent trial.
Esparza was also a student at Ashford University from 2010 to 2013.
“My experience as a student really tracks with a lot of the complaints that we received,” she said.
Poor quality of education, misinformation about financial opportunities, and intimidation tactics added to the strain of a hands-off approach to education for Esparza and more than 100 other students who filed complaints with the veteran education advocacy group.
“These colleges target minorities and low-income people,” Esparza said. “Then they bait-and-switch them. It’s appalling.”
When the University of Arizona acquired Ashford in 2020, Lee was in the midst of her final semester of school. Her tuition nearly doubled from $750 to $1,350 per course at the outset, she said.
For-profit educational institutions like Ashford have a history of abusing and defrauding military students for millions of dollars.
Retail Ready Career Center in Garland, Texas, doled out more than $137 million in restitution to military-affiliated students last year. Indiana State University Purdue acquired for-profit Kaplan University, which had a record of fraud, to create Purdue Global in 2018.
“For-profit schools advertise as veteran-friendly,” Esparza said. “Some of their programs aren’t accredited and students may not understand that. They have the ability to really reel these students in under the pretense that they are more flexible than a public school, which is often not the case.”
Esparza and Lee capitalized on the GI Bill, a law dating back to World War II that provides financial benefits to studious veterans and active-duty members.I was struggling with PTSD and my mental health at the time, but they wouldn't stop harassing me. - Kim Lee
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Ashford University promised those benefits would cover the entire cost of tuition — $28,824 per year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Naturally, Lee was stupefied when Ashford demanded $6,000 from her upon graduation. She was even more dismayed when the university refused to turn over her diploma until the balance was settled.
“That was after GI Bill and Pell Grants,” she said. “It’s a hardship you don’t want to endure.”
Lee was forced to sell her family’s only car to avoid crippling debt.
Kids couldn’t get to school, parents couldn’t get to work. It was not the life she envisioned when an Ashford recruiter told her she’d be wealthy after graduation.
“Ashford is unfriendly and unhelpful to military veterans, especially those experiencing injuries,” Army veteran and former student Jenica King testified to the U.S. Department of Education last week during a public hearing for rulemaking.
Attorneys general in North Carolina, Massachusetts, New York, and Iowa have also investigated fraud and abuse at Ashford University.
“Unfortunately for many Ashford students, they didn’t get the degree they hoped for or the job they were led to believe they’d get after graduating,” Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said after a $7.5 million settlement in 2014. “What they did end up with was a crushing amount of student loan debt.”
Former Iowa Senator Tom Harkin called Ashford, which is not named for any real person, “a scam, an absolute scam.”
He also called the university’s recruitment method “unconscionable.”
Eric Dean, an ex-recruiter and whistleblower in the recent case against Ashford, described how he was pressured to enroll veterans “no matter what,” and to maintain their enrollment for at least three weeks — at which point they would be ineligible for a refund.
Dean said he felt like he was “throwing fellow veterans under the bus” by “relating to them, gaining their trust, and taking advantage of their trust.”
After the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found Ashford “engaged in deceptive acts and practices” in 2016, Zovio and the federal agency entered into a consent order.
Zovio was ordered to dismiss all outstanding private loans and pay a civil penalty totaling more than $31 million.
But footing the legal bill was no problem for Zovio, a publicly-traded company that was flush with cash at the time.
Ashford University churned out hundreds of millions of dollars for Chandler-based Zovio since 2005 and once boasted an enrollment of close to 80,000 students, court records show.
But only a quarter of full-time undergraduate students are returning to the University of Arizona Global Campus after their first year, and even fewer are graduating.
That’s compared to more than 80 percent at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
“The student believes the school has their best interest at heart,” Esparza said. “But they are wrong.”
In October, Zovio reported $62 million in quarterly earnings at the University of Arizona Global Campus. Three years ago, revenue was more than double that amount.
Zovio founder and CEO Andrew Clark departed the company last year, collecting a severance payment of more than $3 million.
It could take as few as 15 student loans to generate that kind of cash.
“I currently have about $200,000 in … loans because of Ashford and UAGC,” former student Jonelle Daugherty said. “Even though my school has changed names and corporate ownership twice since I started, the quality of instruction and disregard of student interests has never improved.”
The university rejects this narrative.
The UAGC Board of Directors continues to focus on fostering a military-friendly institution and is constantly looking for ways to put 16 years of nonstop lawsuits and government inspection in the rearview mirror, directors maintain.
“We will continue to do everything in our power to serve those who have sacrificed to serve our country,” Robertson said.
