WASHINGTON — Aljanal Carroll never doubted her ability to beat the odds — not when a doctor told her she would never go to school after battling spinal meningitis as a child, or when she scored a 4.0- GPA goal in her master’s program, or when she’s heard that black women rarely get a doctorate in business administration.
Then she enrolled at Walden University.
Ms. Carroll began teaching at Walden, a for-profit online school, in the fall of 2017, drawn by the promise that she could complete her PhD in 18 months. She sailed through her coursework, but when it came time for her “final project”—essentially a dissertation—she hit a wall. Her review board took weeks to provide feedback, which was little more than minor grammar and formatting suggestions, but forced her to make revisions, starting the week-long wait all over again.
Three years and tens of thousands of dollars in unexpected tuition fees later passed when Ms. Carroll’s project was approved.
“It was starting to make me feel like I couldn’t write or speak, which didn’t make sense because I just got a 4.0 on my master’s,” said Ms. Carroll, 49. “I knew it didn’t seem right, but I was so far in that I couldn’t turn back.”
Her experience mirrors what a class action lawsuit claims was an insidious plan by Walden to lure and then trap students, particularly blacks and women, into a cycle of debt and despair. The National Student Legal Defense Network, which filed the lawsuit in January on behalf of former students, alleges that Walden violated not only consumer protection laws but also Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by exploiting minorities and women and misrepresenting the costs and credits required to obtain an advanced degree.
The lawsuit, which was filed in Maryland federal court, alleges that Walden intentionally lengthened the process of completing a senior project by requiring students to re-enroll on a semester-by-semester basis and pay tuition the entire time while them to the approval of a three-year membership committee. As a result, the lawsuit estimates the school overcharged students by more than $28.5 million.
“Walden lured students with the promise of an affordable degree and then tricked them into increasing profits,” said Aaron Ament, president of the National Student Legal Defense Network. “As if that wasn’t bad enough, Walden specifically targeted black students and women for this predatory program, masking his discrimination as a focus on diversity.”
The lawsuit further alleges that the school engaged in “reverse redlining,” a practice usually associated with housing discrimination, by targeting its advertising at minority communities and adapting it to appeal to women.
Walden, who has faced similar lawsuits in the past, has denied any wrongdoing. Its mission, it says, is to serve a diverse community, and the school says it has successfully fulfilled that mission. A motion to dismiss the lawsuit said that in 2020 it awarded doctorates to more black and female students than any other school in the United States.
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In the court filing, the university said the lawsuit was a “baseless and inflammatory attempt to repackage Walden’s school mission into calculated discrimination.”
In response to questions about the lawsuit, a spokeswoman for Walden said they “will continue to work to ensure that those groups of people who are typically underrepresented in higher education know that Walden University is an opportunity to gain and access an education.” opportunities to expand.”
Claiming that Walden violated student civil rights is an unusual strategy to prove predatory practices. Critics of the for-profit college sector have often denounced its tactics as an encroachment on civil liberties when pushing for administrative or policy changes, but Title VI and reverse redlining claims are notoriously difficult to prove in court, in part because of the need to prove her intention.
Eileen Connor, the director of Harvard’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has prosecuted one of the few other lawsuits asserting Title VI claims on behalf of students at for-profit colleges and universities, said the courts are “suspicious, if not overly so hostile”. , those reverse redlining claims.”
“It’s not that the claims have no merit or aren’t worth making,” she said. “But stopping the relentless targeting of people of color by predatory schools will require greater involvement from regulators like the Department of Education and the Federal Trade Commission.”
Still, some experts and observers say the lawsuit against Walden could provide a roadmap to hold for-profit institutions accountable for targeting vulnerable populations.
“We know there are organizations that rely on systemic racism to make money, and for-profit organizations are a part of that,” said Dominique J. Baker, assistant professor of educational policy at Southern Methodist University. “It can potentially be an opening salvo of doing this work for other institutions, or an inspiration for the Department of Education and Congress to think about ways institutions can be held accountable for their actions.”
The lawsuit highlights the unique vulnerabilities of black female students, who disproportionately enroll in for-profit schools and who have the most federal undergraduate and graduate student loan debt of any demographic.
Black women are increasingly becoming the face of the student debt crisis as advocates ramp up pressure on the Biden administration to wipe out all $1.7 trillion in state student-loan debt.
A letter released Thursday by the Education Trust, a think tank that supports large-scale debt relief, highlighted the particular plight of black women. It details how they are disproportionately burdened by high college costs, a lack of wealth, and commitments like parenthood, which fuels their desire to attend college but also prevents them from paying for it.
Tressie McMillan Cottom, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former for-profit college recruiter who exposed the sector’s tactics in a book, said such schools have been able to sidestep claims that they are recruiting students due to search by race and gender using identifiers such as “underemployed, aspiring, and poorly served by existing institutions.”
But black women, she said, are particularly likely to fall victim to schools based on what they offer.
“Black women are socialized and conditioned to seek all sorts of formal qualifications,” she said, “because they’re the best way to break implicit bias in the job market — and that could be sold at almost any price.”
In the motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Walden said the lawsuit did not prove that the graduation phase of his program intentionally discriminated against black graduate students or that the graduation phase for black and female students was different than for any other demographic. The school called the reverse redlining claim “novel,” adding that “trying to educate diverse communities does not equate to racial animus.”
Walden also said that over the time that the plaintiffs attended the program, the school changed certain aspects of it, including the cost of credits, and added a disclaimer that times for completing the doctorate might vary.
Tiffany Fair, a lead plaintiff pursuing a doctorate in business administration, said she was only able to exit the program “because the university got tired of me complaining.”
“It was an absolute nightmare,” she said. “To be honest, I don’t even know if anyone read my dissertation.”
Ms Fair, who identifies as multiracial and was her family’s sole breadwinner when she enrolled at Walden in 2016, said she was told she could graduate in two and a half years and that they will do so on a military discount and scholarship would pay you just over $26,200.
She ended up owing $89,000 in loans covering a four-and-a-half year endeavor. When she graduated in January 2021, she had completed 15 courses and 49 capstone credits — 10 courses and 30 credits more than she was told. Her project was approved with virtually no changes, she said.
Now Ms Fair, 43, has a student loan payment of nearly $800 a month that she described as “crippling.”
“I feel fulfilled because I’ve worked hard,” she said. “But I am actually ashamed to be part of a program that is so predatory and I will never get back the time that was stolen from me and my children.”
In October 2020, Ms. Carroll, another lead plaintiff, got what she wanted: to rise in the ranks of her predominantly white company, where she serves as a controller. “I can stick my chest out a little more, maybe I’ll be seen for all the extra hours I’m working,” she said.
But her voice cracked as she recalled how she got there — by paying almost $15,000 more in tuition than she expected. At one point, she said, she broke down, “roaring, crying and saying, ‘I’m tired, I’ve got two kids in college, I gave you everything,'” to the chair of her capstone committee.
“I didn’t quit because of my kids,” she says. “I didn’t want them to be like, ‘If Mommy couldn’t do it, then I can’t do it.’ To have that kind of degree and all the accolades behind it, I teach my daughter that you can do anything regardless of what stats are said to be out there for us.