*Walden University, a for-profit school, deliberately put up a scheme to lure and trap students in a cycle of debt and despair, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in Maryland against the institution. The scheme targeted mainly Black and female students.
The class-action suit was filed by the National Student Legal Defense Network in January on behalf of several ex-students who allege that the school went against consumer protection laws and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by targeting minorities and women when it misrepresented the costs and credits required to acquire an advanced degree.
Aljanal Carroll joined Walden University in 2017 for a doctorate in business administration. At that time, she was told she could complete her course in 18 months. She easily made it through the coursework hoping for timely graduation. But she ran into many issues when she got to her “capstone project.” That is her dissertation.
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Carroll says that the review committee assigned to foresee her project took many weeks to give her feedback, slowing the pace. The worst part is that they made her do revisions due to simple grammatical errors that had little weight on the general project. Each time, she had to start the process over again. By the time her project was finally approved, she had invested three years and more than $10,000 in tuition fees.
“It started to make me feel like I couldn’t write or speak, which didn’t make sense because I’d just earned a 4.0 for my master’s,” Carroll, 49, explained to the Times. “I knew it didn’t seem right, but I was so far in it, I couldn’t turn back.”
The lawsuit makes it clear Walden intentionally stretched out the dissertation process, requiring students to re-enroll for several years and waste thousands more on tuition than they budgeted for. The suit estimates money charged at more than $28.5 million in additional tuition costs. Even former students have come out to complain, claiming the school participated in “reverse redlining” by targeting minority communities and women with its misleading adverts.
“Walden lured in students with the promise of an affordable degree, then strung them along to increase profits,” said Aaron Ament, the president of the National Student Legal Defense Network. “As if that’s not bad enough, Walden specifically targeted Black students and women for this predatory program, masking its discrimination as a focus on diversity.”
This is not the first time Walden has faced such lawsuits and claims. But it has denied the latest allegations, saying its mission is to serve a diverse community. It has filed a motion to dismiss the suit, terming it “baseless and an inflammatory attempt to repackage Walden’s school mission into calculated discrimination.”
Walden has also pointed out that it awarded doctorate degrees to more Black and female students in 2020 than any other U.S. university.
Black students in the U.S. have often fallen victims to student loan debt and college tuition matters. Many of them end up taking up expensive loans because it is the only way to pay for college. However, this only pushes them into a financial nightmare because it can take years to decades to repay the loans after graduating.
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