A class-action lawsuit against Walden University, a private, for-profit, online institution has concluded with the school settling and agreeing to pay the plaintiffs $28.5 million, pending court approval.
Dr. Aljanal Carroll
In the lawsuit – filed in Maryland in 2022 by national civil rights law firm Relman Colfax and the National Student Legal Defense Network – the plaintiffs claimed that Walden engaged in false advertising and misrepresentations about the costs and duration of its Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) program, one of its many doctoral offerings.
Specifically, the school was alleged to have prolonged how long it would take for students to complete the second phase of the program, a final “capstone” research and writing project. Because the school took extended amounts of time to review students’ work during the “capstone courses,” students were effectively made to continue enrolling in these courses long past the expected timeframe for degree completion, paying tuition all the while. To stop was to leave with debt but no degree.
In the case of Dr. Aljanal Carroll, a named plaintiff, what was advertised as an academic pursuit that was supposed to take one and a half years ended up taking three, she told Diverse. She started the program in September 2017 and finished in October 2020.
"It kept going and going and going,” said Carroll, an adjunct professor at Columbia International University. “We would submit our work, and it got sent back for periods, commas, and little stuff like that that just made you very discouraged, frustrated. It was little stuff like that that just made it difficult for us. But we did not quit. We were already too late in the game to stop or go somewhere else. So we kept going."
Her capstone dissertation was sent back to her by Walden’s review committee about 12-14 times, she said. And because she had already finished her coursework in the first phase of the program, all she could do was wait during this review process.
Carroll was supposed to enroll in five of these capstone courses, each lasting eight to 11 weeks and costing $2,400-$2,600. She ended up having to take 12, she said.
