Months after it was announced that Grand Canyon University (GCU), the country’s largest Christian university, was being fined $37.7 million by the federal government for allegations that they misled students about the full costs of some of their programs, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has also announced they’re suing the 120,000-student school for “deception.”
According to a recent notice on their website, the FTC is suing GCU, Grand Canyon Education (GCE) and GCU president Brain Mueller for “deceiving prospective doctoral students about the cost and course requirements of its doctoral programs and about being a nonprofit” while also engaging in “deceptive and abusive telemarketing practices.”
For the former, the FTC says that some of GCU’s doctoral programs advertise one price to finish, when in reality, 98% of students require additional “continuation courses” to complete, adding thousands of dollars to the cost of their program. They also say that “the defendants also used abusive telemarketing calls to try to boost enrollment at GC” and that “GCE advertised on websites and social media urging prospective students to submit their contact information on digital forms. GCE telemarketers then used the information to illegally contact people who have specifically requested not to be called, as well as people on the National Do Not Call Registry. GCE has also made illegal calls to numbers it purchased from lead generators.
Responding to the varied allegations, GCU claims they are being “unjustly targetted” by the government and that this is much ado about nothing.
“To be frank, the substance of these claims is so frivolous that they could have easily been resolved in a 10-minute phone call had the agencies chosen to do so. We would have disagreed with the agencies’ conclusions but believe a reasonable accommodation could have been reached in each case in a spirit of cooperation. Instead, the agencies have chosen to, quite literally, make a federal case out of what should be minor disagreements.”
