Ashford University and its parent entity Zovio comprise a for-profit education operation that the chairman of a Senate committee branded “an absolute scam” during a 2011 investigative hearing highlighting the company’s deceptive advertising, predatory recruiting, high prices, and weak educational offerings. More than a decade later, after tens of thousands more students have used billions in taxpayer dollars and their own money to attend Ashford (attendance peaked in 2012 at around 77,000), the school is still in business, still enrolling students today, still with more than 20,000 students taking online courses, in an operation still staffed by Zovio, even though University of Arizona bought the school in 2020 and renamed it University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC).
But the whole miserable exercise, which has deceived, crushed the dreams of, and buried in debt veterans, single moms, and others across the country, and put the company in jeopardy with law enforcement multiple times, may finally be ending.
On March 3, following a trial where the California attorney general’s office presented extensive evidence of deceptive practices by the school, a state judge ruled that Zovio, which was previously called Bridgepoint Education, “violated the law by giving students false or misleading information about career outcomes, cost and financial aid, pace of degree programs, and transfer credits, in order to entice them to enroll at Ashford.”
This week, in a…
