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The University of Phoenix has agreed to pay $4.5 million in a settlement over unlawful recruitment tactics for military students, the California Attorney General’s office announced Thursday.
The settlement concludes a nearly decade-long investigation into the online, for-profit university’s “aggressive” recruitment of veterans who qualified for the Post-9/11 GI Bill between 2012 and 2015. During that period, the university paid over $250,000 to the U.S. military to sponsor 89 recruiting events, including concerts, a fashion show and a chocolate festival, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Those recruitment practices netted the university $1.6 billion dollars in federal education benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs between 2013 and 2021. That made the University of Phoenix the top recipient of GI Bill funding of any institution in the country in the last decade, despite flouting an executive order from President Obama forbidding such tactics at for-profit institutions. The attorney general’s investigation found that the University of Phoenix also violated California’s False Advertising Law and Unfair Competition Law.
“The University of Phoenix used deceptive and unlawful tactics to convince service members to use their hard-earned education benefits at its own institution, in place of any number of less expensive, high-quality schools,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.
In addition to the $4.5 million fee, the university has to comply with a number of injunctions on recruitment of military veterans, including a prohibition on recruiting agents attending training sessions and orientations for service members and using military seals on its advertising.
