The U.S. Department of Education has discharged $4.5 billion in loans for former students of Ashford University, the agency said Wednesday.
The discharge covers 261,000 borrowers who attended the mostly online for-profit institution between March 2009 and April 2020. The move came in response to a request from the California Department of Justice, which found “widespread misrepresentations” around cost, financial aid, time to complete a degree and other areas.
“Numerous federal and state investigations have documented the deceptive recruiting tactics frequently used by Ashford University,” James Kvaal, the federal department’s top higher education official, said in a statement. “In reality, 90 percent of Ashford students never graduated, and the few who did were often left with large debts and low incomes.”
The Education Department cited findings that Ashford recruited students into professional degree programs such as in teaching, nursing and social work without acquiring the needed state approval for their students to practice in those fields. It also said Ashford recruiters lied about attendance costs and available financial aid, among other things.
Ashford has since been acquired by the University of Arizona, which in turn rebranded it as University of Arizona Global Campus. The Education Department signaled in 2023 that the public university could be required to cover some of the costs in a past discharge of Ashford loans that amounted to $72 million.
In a statement, a University of Arizona spokesperson said that the university “had no relationship with Ashford or Zovio during this time period.”
In addition to the discharge, the Education Department proposed a governmentwide debarment of Andrew Clark, the founder and former CEO of Zovio, which previously owned Ashford. The debarment would run at least three years and prevent Clark from being a principal or executive at any institution involved in the federal Title IV student aid program.
“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 in its Wednesday announcement.
The agency said it would refer the debarment to its Office of Hearings and Appeals, which will issue a final decision.
