The students interviewed by USA TODAY aren’t alone in their discontent with CTU. The advocacy group Veterans Education Success has collected about 500 complaints from veterans who attended Perdoceo schools as recently as 2021. Of those complaints, about 1 in 5 were related to how the universities recruited and marketed to students. Another 16% reported issues with financing their education.

“How is this fraudster company still eligible for federal student aid and GI Bill benefits?” asked Carrie Wofford, the head of the advocacy group. “We’ve given the government hundreds of student veteran complaints and multiple whistleblowers with evidence. The government needs to stop the fraud and stop throwing veterans under the bus.”

College didn’t seem like an option for Chris Glock when he graduated from high school in the early 2000s. His family struggled financially, so he joined the Marine Corps to take advantage of the GI Bill, which covers veterans’ education costs for roughly four years.

He first attended the ITT Technical Institute, and was happy with his experience before the chain of for-profit colleges closed suddenly in 2016. In 2019, he started again, at Colorado Technical University.

At the start, the school seemed eager to enroll him, even pressuring him to sign up immediately or risk losing access to the GI Bill. Glock later learned the university offered his required courses frequently, and he was eligible for additional government money that would cover his education.

“None of it had ever been mentioned,” Glock said. “It was always about how I needed to hurry up and finish.”

Often, his coursework was no more complicated than watching a YouTube video or performing a Google search. When he finally graduated from CTU, Glock felt cheated. He said the college had also promised to help place him in a job. At ITT Tech, his instructors had known people in the IT industry and even helped students participate in mock interviews.

None of that happened at CTU.

“I don’t even feel like I could go out and sit in an interview,” he said. “It’s very humiliating to go to school for four years and to not even be able to adequately redesign a simple website for a company.”

Glock said he has since found more success in cheaper, one-off online learning courses.

Read the full story here in USA Today.