A whistleblower is alleging for-profit college Colorado Technical University has made fraudulent claims for financial aid money while failing to meet federal requirements, denying students the education they were promised, according to a civil lawsuit filed in U.S. district court.
The lawsuit claims CTU — a private, for-profit college headquartered in Illinois with campuses in Aurora and Colorado Springs and an online program — has failed to provide anywhere near the amount of educational content required to meet financial aid regulations and falsified documents to show otherwise.
A representative for Colorado Technical University did not respond to a request for comment.
“Many of CTU’s students come from underserved communities and most are eligible to receive Pell Grants and federal student loans,” said Marlene Koury, attorney at the San Francisco law firm Constantine Cannon, which is representing the anonymous whistleblower who worked at CTU. “The case alleges that CTU enrolls these students to extract federal funding, fails to provide them the education the government and taxpayers are paying them to provide, and often leaves students without an education and saddled with debt for courses that did not qualify for federal funding.”
According to Colorado Technical University’s website, earning a bachelor’s degree in 2023 will cost around $65,000. CTU’s latest graduation rate is about 20% for their brick-and-mortar and online programs. The institution has a student retention rate of 45% for online, full-time students and 27% for part-time students.
The lawsuit alleges CTU provides students enrolled in 4.5 credit hour online courses with around 10 or fewer learning hours for courses that are supposed to contain 135 learning hours to meet financial aid requirements. The institution uses a software platform called Intellipath intended to skip content a student already knows, but the software allegedly reduces already meager course content offerings for each student, the lawsuit said.
CTU then allegedly falsifies the number of learning hours it provides on documentation to make it seem as though they are providing more content and “to keep the federal funding flowing into their coffers,” Koury said.
The case is moving forward with discovery, Koury said, including document discovery and depositions expected to happen this year.
For-profit colleges have been under fire in Colorado and across the country for years, accused of defrauding students and the federal government. The U.S. Education Department in recent years has erased student debt for borrowers who attended certain fraudulent for-profit institutions.
“The whistleblower hopes to recoup for the government and taxpayers the hundreds of millions of dollars the complaint alleges CTU fraudulently obtained for courses that do not qualify for financial aid, and to force CTU to change its practices and begin providing its students with the required amount of educational content under the federal financial aid regulations,” Koury said.
