Dear Commons Community,
A class-action lawsuit alleges that Walden University engaged in a scheme to lure students, especially those who were Black and female, into a cycle of debt and despair. The suit claims that Walden University not only misrepresented the costs and credits required for an advanced degree but also engaged in “reverse redlining” by targeting minority communities. The National Student Legal Defense Network, which is representing the students with the civil rights law firm Relman Colfax, claims that Walden violated not only consumer protection laws, but also Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by preying on minorities and women and misrepresenting the costs and credits required for getting an advanced degree. Here is an excerpt of an article as reported in The New York Times:
“The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Maryland, charges that Walden intentionally stretched out the process of completing a capstone project, requiring students to re-enroll for semesters on end, paying tuition all the while, while they waited for approval from a three-member committee. As a result, the suit estimates, the school overcharged students by more than $28.5 million.
“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.”
The lawsuit further claims that the school engaged in “reverse redlining,” a practice usually associated with housing discrimination, by targeting minority communities with its advertising and tailoring it to appeal to women.
Walden, which has faced similar lawsuits in the past, has denied any wrongdoing. Its mission, it says, is to serve a diverse community, and the school says it has succeeded in that mission. In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, it said that in 2020, it awarded doctorate degrees to a greater number of Black and female students than any other school in the United States.
In the court filing, the university said the suit was a “baseless and inflammatory attempt to repackage Walden’s school mission into calculated discrimination.”
In response to questions about the lawsuit, a spokeswoman for Walden said it would “continue to work to ensure that those groups of people that have been typically underrepresented in higher education know that attaining an education and expanding their access to opportunities is possible at Walden University.”
The claim that Walden violated students’ civil rights is an unusual strategy for proving predatory practices. Critics of the for-profit college sector have often denounced its tactics as impinging on civil rights when pressing for administrative or policy changes, but Title VI and reverse-redlining claims are notoriously difficult to prove in court, in part because of the need to prove intent.
Eileen Connor, the director of Harvard’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has pursued one of the only other lawsuits to make Title VI claims on behalf of students at for-profit colleges and universities, said courts were “suspicious of, if not hostile to, these reverse-redlining claims.”
“It’s not that the claims don’t have merit or are not worth bringing,” she said. “But to stop relentless targeting of people of color by predatory schools, it’s going to require greater involvement from regulators like the Department of Education and the Federal Trade Commission.”
These poor students!
Tony
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
