The announcement brings some measure of relief and justice to a huge number of former students of Ashford, which evolved from a single campus in Iowa that Zovio acquired in 2005 to a massive, high-priced, poor-quality, mostly-online school that got billions from taxpayers while leaving many worse off than when they enrolled. Ashford and Zovio were held liable and penalized $20 million for scamming students by a California court following a 2022 trial brought by that state’s attorney general. The verdict was upheld on appeal.
The former students were enrolled at Ashford by aggressive recruiters who told a lot of falsehoods but could say, truthfully, that the school was approved for federal student grants and loans by the Department of Education. The Department let these students down by keeping its good housekeeping seal on the school and thus keeping predatory Ashford eligible for taxpayer money. The Biden administration deserves credit for at last righting some of this wrong.
The California trial echoed numerous past reports of abuses by Zovio and Ashford. In fact, at a hearing focused on Ashford way back in 2011, then-Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) declared Ashford “an absolute scam.” The California court found that Zovio and Ashford “created a high pressure culture in admissions that prioritized enrollment numbers over compliance.” The case included detailed testimony from Ashford employees about a deceptive operation engineered by senior Zovio executives — and about numerous lives ruined by a school that never earned the certifications that would allow graduates to even be eligible for the teaching, social work, and other jobs they sought.
Unfortunately for today’s students, Ashford continues to operate. It just changed its name to University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC). In August 2020, Zovio sold Ashford to the University of Arizona, in a shady deal that allowed Zovio to hide the school under the apron of the powerful state university and shed the stigma that for-profit schools like Ashford had brought upon themselves — and yet still permit Zovio to make big money with a long term contract to run Ashford’s operations. After the California verdict, the University of Arizona forced Zovio out of the arrangement, but it hired most of Zovio’s employees and carried on with Zovio’s playbook. Mounting evidence of financial losses and continued predatory practices at the school likely played a role in the resignation of the school’s president last year.
The Department said that the California AG office had requested today’s loan discharges for Ashford students, based on evidence developed in its lawsuit “around widespread misrepresentations in nine separate areas, including students’ ability to obtain needed licensure, transfer credits, the cost and amount of financial aid, and the time it would take to earn a degree.” The Department said it conducted its own review of the evidence before acting.
Ashford has been sued or investigated by other federal and state agencies, including the U.S. Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the attorneys general of Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina. A 2015 settlement with the CFPB forced Ashford to discharge $23.5 million in high-interest private loans and pay an $8 million civil penalty.
“Numerous federal and state investigations have documented the deceptive recruiting tactics frequently used by Ashford University,” U.S. Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal said in a statement today. “In reality, 90 percent of Ashford students never graduated, and the few who did were often left with large debts and low incomes. Today’s announcement will finally provide relief to many students who were harmed by Ashford’s illegal actions.”
In 2023 the Department announced $72 million in debt cancellation for more than 2,300 Ashford borrowers who who applied for relief. But with today’s action, a much larger group of former Ashford students will get automatic relief, without having to apply and prove their cases. The Department says it will email former Ashford students informing them of the discharge.
When it announced that first $72 million in relief in 2023, the Department said it planned to come after the University of Arizona to recoup the losses, which federal permits. Today’s announcement creates an even greater risk of liability for the state school. U of A has denied it would be responsible, but its purchase agreement with Zovio suggests otherwise.
Separately, the Department issued a Notice of Proposed Government-Wide Debarment from Federal Procurement and Non-Procurement Transactions to Clark, the founder and former CEO of Zovio — aiming at a decision that would, among other things, prevent Clark from working as a principal or executive of any college getting federal aid.
In a statement today, the Department said it was acting against Clark “because Ashford violated federal regulations regarding making substantial misrepresentations. The evidence from the California litigation, and other sources, which the Department independently reviewed, is mountainous. The conduct of Ashford can be imputed to Mr. Clark because he participated in, knew, or had reason to know of Ashford’s misrepresentations. Mr. Clark not only supervised the unlawful conduct, he personally participated in it, driving some of the worst aspects of the boiler-room-style recruiting culture.”
The Department said it would refer the proposed debarment to its Office of Hearings and Appeals, with a recommendation that Clark be banned for “not less than three years .” (Three years?) Clark would have an opportunity to oppose the move.
I’m not sure Clark will bother, if indeed the debarment effort goes forward under the administration of former Trump University head Donald J. Trump. Clark’s last reported job on his LinkedIn page is as CEO of Zovio, which went out of business in 2022. Clark made tens or even hundreds of millions running Zovio, with annual compensation topping $20 million in at least one year.
Clark abruptly left the company in 2021. Others responsible for awful Zovio, which changed its name from Bridgepoint Education in 2019, include Ryan Craig, a private equity man who served on the board from 2003 to 2022, and Robert Eitel, who worked at the company from 2015 to 2017 and later was one of Betsy DeVos’s top aides in the first Trump Department of Education.
On Monday, the Department of Education granted similar automatic debt relief to 73,600 borrowers who attended schools of the disgraced chain Center for Excellence Higher Education. That operation’s CEO, Eric Juhlin, was similarly debarred by the Department in 2021.
Unfortunately for today’s students, who will now be at the mercy of the incoming Trump administration, in addition to Ashford-n0w-UAGC, there are still many awful, large for-profit chains still running, including Perdoceo and the University of Phoenix.
There’s one other thing the Biden administration could do to halt Ashford’s abuses before it turns over the keys to the Trump administration, which last time did almost everything possible to help predatory schools abuse students: It could act on the long-pending application by Arizona to approve the change of ownership of Ashford. It should reject the application. And the University of Arizona should shut down this scam school once and for all.
When I first got involved in the issue of for-profit colleges, back in 2010, I received a phone call from a man who said he was on a golf course in the San Diego area, where Zovio, then called Bridgepoint, was located. He said that a bunch of Bridgepoint executives were playing golf while loudly mocking Ashford students. He held up the phone so I could hear the laughter.
