Class Action Claims NCU Misled Doctoral Students Regarding Length, Cost of Online Programs

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A proposed class action filed in California federal court claims Northcentral University, Inc. (NCU) misled prospective students regarding the length and cost of the school’s online doctoral programs in order to collect the “maximum amount of tuition.”

The plaintiff claims she enrolled in the university’s Doctor of Education program after the school’s marketing materials and a recruiter represented that she could obtain her degree in about three-and-a-half to five years at a cost of $30,600. In later documents, however, NCU allegedly admitted that the program was designed to take 81 months, or almost seven years, to complete and would cost over $50,000 in tuition and fees.

According to the lawsuit, NCU intentionally designed its doctoral programs to be “fraught with inefficiencies” that caused them to extend well beyond the timeline represented to students. Once enrolled in one of the school’s online programs, the suit explains, students were met with “an endless series of hurdles, delays, and tuition payments” that slowed their progress and burdened them with additional unexpected costs. From the complaint:

“Students who believed that they were getting ever closer to their doctoral degree were repeatedly confronted with decreasing resources, high faculty turnover, disorganization, a lack of oversight, poorly trained instructors, a twenty-one-day-turnaround time (with most instructors taking the full twenty-one days to respond their students), and little to no constructive feedback (or if feedback was given, inconsistent feedback), all of which extended the doctoral students’ enrollments at NCU.”

The result, according to the suit, was that many students were forced to choose between abandoning their educational pursuits or paying thousands of dollars in additional tuition fees to NCU to finish their degrees.

For her part, the plaintiff paid NCU a total of $73,000 in tuition by the time she graduated, the suit says, an amount “far higher than what was promised” when she originally enrolled. Most doctoral students, the case observes, do not graduate from the school and are left with “crushing debt and an inability to take future federal loans.”

The plaintiff says she never would have enrolled in NCU had the true cost and length of the doctorate program been represented to her.