Navy veteran Adam Young’s superhero poster is worth more than his college degree.
To him, at least.
The poster on his wall depicting the Hulk, Captain America and Iron Man is neatly framed in mint condition.
It’s nerd nirvana inside his Chandler home. Glass cabinets brim with anime and video game action figures. Funko Pops, Rubik’s cubes and console controllers are strewn around the super-wide curved computer monitor on his desk. A plasma ball dances above a retro arcade machine.
And next to the katana swords on the wall are those meticulously framed posters of Harry Potter, League of Legends and, of course, the Marvel pantheon.
Young, an aspiring video game creator, proudly displays his prized possessions. Notably absent is his degree in video game design from Full Sail University, creased and relegated to a dusty box in the corner.
It used to be his dream school — but the dream turned into a nightmare.
He never even took his diploma out of the envelope it came in. The superheroes on his Marvel poster cast a judgmental gaze on the forsaken degree from their perch high on the wall.
“I call it Full Fail University,” Young quipped, tossing the parcel back into its cardboard coffin. “Full Sail felt like such a scam school.”
The university didn’t just fail to launch his career — it crash-landed it — pilfering Young’s G.I. Bill benefits, leaving him high and dry in the job market and dismissing his post-combat PTSD like yesterday’s news.
“Schools like this shouldn’t be able to exist and screw over veterans,” Young told American Veterans Magazine, echoing the sentiments of many veterans who’ve fallen victim to the false promises of for-profit diploma mills.
But he’s no silent victim. In March, he was among a chorus of veteran voices testifying to the U.S. Department of Education in demand of oversight. These institutions cash in on dreams and crush them, leaving veterans broke and professionally adrift.
‘My PTSD was the problem’
You could say Young was a jock before he was a nerd.
Those were back in his Navy days, when he was an aviation boatswain’s mate in charge of damage control for his division from 2003 to 2007. Pushed to do drugs and run away from physical abuse at home, enlisting was his escape from a living hell.
But new traumas awaited him after he donned Service Dress Blue.
Post-9/11 veterans like Young are twice as likely to have an emotionally traumatizing experience during service and two-and-a-half times more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD compared to pre-9/11 veterans, according to a survey by the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Pew Research Center.
For Young, this trend bears out.
The 40-year-old is haunted by specters of war he witnessed on deployment two decades ago in the Persian Gulf off the coast of Iraq.
When al Qaeda terrorists on rib boats besieged his ship and shot at him, he watched as an anti-submarine helicopter blew the men to pieces.
One of his own chiefs was decapitated by a helicopter rotor, and another was sucked into the intake of an F-18 fighter plane. A close friend went overboard, never to be seen again. All Young found was a nameless floater, and he watched as a shipmate tried to retrieve the body, stripping flesh from bone. He never learned who it was, and the report was later classified.
“It’s all just embedded in my mind,” Young said.
According to Pew Research Center, post-9/11 veterans are three-and-a-half times more likely to seek psychological help recovering from trauma compared to pre-9/11 veterans, most often seeking a counselor through an employer or university.
When Young sought resources through his university to grapple with his PTSD and a suicide scare, “They didn’t seem to care one bit,” he said.
And when he aired concerns about the quality of his instruction to his program director, “She came to the conclusion that I was the problem,” he said. “’My PTSD was the problem’ — those were her exact words.”
Pain in the neg
In March, Young joined two dozen other veterans in testifying to the U.S. Department of Education during its “Neg Reg” — a hearing in which affected interest groups negotiate federal education regulations — blowing the whistle on lax oversight and widespread abuse as the government prepares to tighten college authorization and accreditation standards.
“Veterans are rightfully furious when they realize that an accredited school — approved by both the Department of Education and the VA — failed to provide a marketable degree or a quality education in return for their hard-earned G.I. Bill benefits,” Della Justice, vice president for legal affairs at the Washington, D.C., bipartisan nonprofit Veterans Education Success, said in an email to American Veterans Magazine.
“Student veterans rely on the government’s system for school oversight, but the system is broken. Now is the time to close the floodgates and improve the standards so that student veterans get the education and outcomes they deserve.”
Young questioned Full Sail’s accreditation after he learned his $60,000 degree in game design was about as useful as a side quest in a speedrun. The gaming industry does not recognize “game design” as a legitimate degree because it is too broad.
Public schools like Arizona State University and Purdue University offer degrees in computer science and 3D animation with a focus on game development. But a google search for “video game degree” invariably returns Full Sail University as the first result, in the form of a sponsored link.
Young ate up the school’s ubiquitous online ads like Pac-Man, and in 2012 he declared it his dream school. In 2020, he finally enrolled, completing his degree last year. The red flags appeared early — the curriculum was outdated, YouTube videos replaced live instruction, students were unfairly accused of cheating and teachers made disparaging comments about students with PTSD and cognitive disabilities.
You can’t teach, stupid
In messages leaked to American Veterans Magazine, student Nash Crawford complains to game development Professor John Seitz that he isn’t receiving adequate guidance, explanation or acknowledgment when seeking help with the course material.
Seitz’s response is shocking.
The professor — who is teaching in the Game Design degree program — responds, “Can you teach someone how to design or debug? You really can’t.”
Seitz writes that Crawford is trying to “start an argument to fire-up the entitled mob even more.”
When Crawford expresses he is struggling to grasp the course material and asks for help, Seitz’s response is this: “I personally blame the public schools system for graduating students that should have never graduated. Students graduating that cannot read, tell analog time, write a complete sentence, or simple math.”
These complaints over student aptitude are from a professor at a university with a 100% acceptance rate.
Dishonorable Discord
These messages are not via email. Instead, they are exchanged over Discord, a chat room website “primarily used by gamers,” according to the company. Young said he did not have contact with his professors via email or phone during his three years of study.
University email servers are standard because they allow administrators to monitor communications sent from university-affiliated email addresses. This oversight is particularly useful for addressing grievances and facilitating mediation when needed.
Students in the game design program only communicated with their professors over Discord servers, where administrators were blind to all communication. Using chatrooms over email meant professors routinely deleted students’ questions and even placed them in “time out,” where they’d be unable to chat, reply, react or join voice channels for a time set by the professor.
In a letter to Young dated Aug. 18, 2023, Full Sail University Director of Military Affairs Troy East denies any wrongdoing by the school.
Full Sail’s public relations director, Casey Tanous, declined to answer any questions from American Veterans Magazine.
Full Sail University rakes in more than $200 million a year. Less than half of students complete a four-year degree within eight years, according to data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
The overall graduation rate is 39%, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That’s compared to 80% at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where Young studies now.
Tuition at Full Sail costs $28,559, 57% higher than the average university, while graduates earn $43,332, 17% worse than the average degree holder.
According to Pew Research Center, experiencing a traumatic event, being a post-9/11 veteran and not being a college graduate are all factors making a return to civilian life more difficult.
For Young, all apply.
It’s high time universities take that into account, he says.
Raw recruitment
For the students who testified to the U.S. Department of Education early this year, demands were fourfold, according to Veterans Education Success:
- Stop allowing schools to provide only pre-recorded instruction or YouTube videos rather than live instruction.
- Stop the bait-and-switch and ensure schools deliver the programs they promised.
- Stop nursing schools from inflating their state licensing pass rates by withholding graduation.
- Stop leaving students in the lurch when accredited schools abruptly shut down.
For Glendale Marine Corps veteran Galen Stutesman, that last pillar hits close to home. After he earned 100 credit hours at the University of Phoenix online, his e-business degree program was canceled. Not only were his G.I. Bill benefits exhausted, but he was also left $55,000 in personal debt.
Stutesman served in the Marine Corps from 2004 to 2008. As a corporal based out of the Marine Unmanned Aerial Squadron 1 in Twentynine Palms, Calif., he was deployed to Iraq from 2005 to 2006. He was deployed to Afghanistan twice as a U.S. Department of Defense contractor in 2012 and 2013 and patrolled the border as a provost’s marshal, a Marine arm of the U.S. Military Police.
Stutesman is a post-9/11 veteran who was married while serving, yet another factor making re-entry into civilian life more difficult, according to Pew Research Center.
Inspired by his entrepreneur mother and goaded by his wife, a University of Phoenix employee, he enrolled and started a job as a military admissions advisor six weeks before he was discharged.
Recruiters bewitched Stutesman with promises he’d make a $100,000 salary after graduation as a remote worker, justifying the $240,000 degree. The university cited U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, so it seemed legit.
He didn’t realize the statistic applied to graduates of any four-year school with that degree — the recruiters didn’t mention University of Phoenix graduates made an average $37,769.
As a student, “There was never any offer of mental health assistance,” Stutesman said.
But it was as an employee in the admissions office where reality set in. In that role, he enrolled 240 fellow veterans. One graduated.
Just one.
Worse still, he faced back-to-back pay cuts for not enrolling enough students. That came amid a divorce and child custody battle he lost because he didn’t earn enough money.
He wanted to leave the job, but quickly learned nobody would hire him to do anything except hawking for-profit universities, he said in an interview with American Veterans Magazine.
“I either sleep on a bench and can’t feed my child, or I sell degrees at these universities because I couldn’t get a job doing anything else without getting a big pay cut,” Stutesman said.
The University of Phoenix was the first institution to ever launch a fully online higher education degree program in 1989.
Job insecurity
In an interview with American Veterans Magazine, University of Phoenix spokesperson Lilia Dashevsky said the school is not legally able to discuss the specifics of any student’s individual education. She maintained the university complies with all laws.
This was her statement to American Veterans Magazine:
“University of Phoenix is proud to support all of our students. Countless adult learners choose us because our flexible online programs and career-focused curriculum meet their unique needs. As a result, our students exceed core competencies that employers identify as top skills which matter greatly in today’s competitive job market through our skills-aligned programs. Furthermore, our commitment to our students begins prior to them ever enrolling at the university — with our transparent, upfront tuition pricing and our Tuition Guarantee that a student’s tuition will not change for the duration of their time with us. From the start, University of Phoenix has been dedicated to serving a variety of adult learners in their pursuit of higher education, and we are proud of the success we have achieved on behalf of our current students and over 1 million alumni.”
In 2020, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs suspended educational benefits for new students enrolling in programs at the University of Phoenix, citing “erroneous, deceptive or misleading” enrollment practices.
Today, Stutesman has yet to graduate from college. He pays $800 per month in student loans.
“I would never tell a friend or even an enemy of mine to go enroll at any of these places,” he said. “It’s going to take an act of Congress to get the G.I. benefits back that I lost when the University of Phoenix canceled my degree program.”
An act of Congress is what he’s seeking, which is how he found Veterans Education Success.
An analysis of BLS data shows veterans were more likely than nonveterans to be employed every year from 2006 to 2019, peaking at more than 6% more employable in 2007.
After 2019, things about-faced. Veterans like Young and Stutesman aged 35 to 64 are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed than nonveterans the same age, according to BLS.
The Obama Administration improved oversight to address the student debt crisis, but the Trump Administration reversed these measures, leading to more exploitation of veterans. The Biden Administration expressed intent to restore oversight, but the new regulations must be finalized by Nov. 1 or else the process will restart under either Biden or his successor next year.
And that’s where Veterans Education Success comes in.
‘They should be put in jail’
Veterans and online college go together like peas and carrots.
For soldiers juggling the stress of service, family and unpredictable schedules, studying online is a smart choice. It helps service members balance military duties with getting a degree or learning a trade.
In fact, education benefits are one of the primary reasons people enlist in the military, according to a survey of 5,000 Army recruits by the Santa Monica, Calif., nonprofit policy thinktank RAND Corporation.
The sheer demand for online education among veterans is perhaps why they’re so often preyed upon. The pandemic only exacerbated that demand, explains Will Hubbard, vice president for veterans and military policy at Veterans Education Success.
“The reality is we didn’t choose COVID — COVID was put on us,” Hubbard told American veterans Magazine. “Online education as a result did not spike because it was so much better. There was no other option available at the time. The idea that online education is somehow the solution for the future — it couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Without advertising, Veterans Education Success has seen “an overwhelming number of people reaching out to us, capacity we do not have,” Hubbard said. “The unfortunate reality is what we see is the mere tip of the iceberg. We know there are tens or even hundreds of thousands who have been affected by predatory schools that have taken advantage of these individuals.”
For every person Veterans Education Success helps, thousands more go unsupported, he said. That’s why the group took to the Neg Reg to advocate systemic change. During testimony, federal school regulators’ tone and tenor changed every time a veteran testified.
Usually a purely performative display, Hubbard said he believed this year’s public comment period changed the trajectory of the conversation. Because the issue didn’t reach consensus, the DOE will write the final rules — given the negotiations they heard from veterans like Young.
“The impact those folks had cannot be underestimated,” Hubbard said. “They’ve earned the opportunity to earn a strong future. A school that comes in and takes that from them, they should be put in jail. The executives should be put in jail.”
Scam U
Justice is not absent in the world of predatory for-profit higher education, although far too many await it.
Chandler-based educational services company Zovio, Inc., faced fraud charges in San Diego County Superior Court and was found guilty in 2022 of “giving students false information about career outcomes, pace of degree programs, and transfer credits, in order to entice them to enroll at Ashford,” according to Judge Eddie C. Sturgeon’s decision.
Zovio administered San Diego-based Ashford University, later sold to the University of Arizona and rebranded as University of Arizona Global Campus.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said students “deserve more than empty promises and mounting debt, yet that is all that Ashford University had to offer them” when he lodged the fraud charges in 2017.
Zovio was ordered to repay north of $22 million to students around the country, largely in Arizona.
In its deal with UAGC, Zovio paid $37.5 million upfront to maintain the reigns to most daily operations, including recruiting and support services. As part of the deal, UAGC would share tuition profits with Zovio to the tune of $225 million over 15 years.
“The company emphatically denies the allegations that it ever deliberately misled its students, falsely advertised its programs, or in any way was not fully accurate in its statements to investors,” Zovio said in a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Despite the rebrand, “Zovio continues to provide the same misleading enrollment and marketing services to the University of Arizona Global Campus as it previously provided to Ashford,” Bonta said in a statement.
In March, amid a $177 million deficit after revenue tanked in the wake of that court ruling, the DOE wants to force the University of Arizona to pay back even more loan debt to students like Angela McMillen, who took out more than $140,000 in loans for a doctorate degree in psychology that turned out to be a master’s degree unsuitable to practice psychology in any capacity.
The Navy veteran from Pierce, Colo., said she was “duped” after realizing her credits weren’t transferable.
Zovio and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau entered into a consent order after the federal agency found Zovio “engaged in deceptive acts and practices.” The company dismissed its outstanding loans to students and paid more than $31 million in civil penalties — but did not stop the deceptive practices, the California court later ruled.
That from a school earning $62 million every quarter on the backs of students who, more than 75% of the time, do not return after their first year of enrollment. After losing in court, Zovio founder and CEO Andrew Clark resigned and took a $3 million severance payout.
“The University of Arizona is not responsible for the actions of Ashford University,” university spokesperson Pam Scott said in a statement. UofA President Robert Robbins contested the payback plan in a meeting with Arizona congressmen on Capitol Hill last year.
Ex-Ashford University recruiter and whistleblower Eric Dean said, like Stutesman, he was told to enroll veterans “no matter what,” and keep them on the hook for at least three weeks until they were no longer eligible for a refund.
Mirroring Stutesman’s experience as a recruiter at another Arizona for-profit university, Dean said he was “throwing fellow veterans under the bus” by “relating to them, gaining their trust and taking advantage of their trust.”
In 2022, UAGC lost its G.I. Bill funding.
Gov. Katie Hobbs denigrated the Arizona Board of Regents in February, saying the board members “failed in their oversight role.” She decisively told reporters, “It is crystal clear that the handling of the University of Arizona crisis is heading in the wrong direction.”
School Lies
For-profit online colleges have a track record of leaving veterans broke and unemployable. Many like Ashford University are gobbled up by large public universities before they have the chance to atone and turned into “global” campuses, so the parent university doesn’t have to build an online campus from scratch.
In 2018, Purdue University bought the for-profit Kaplan University, mired in a false claims lawsuit and under scrutiny from Congress, to create Purdue Global.
In 2019, Colorado Technical University paid $30 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges it used deceptive marketing to recruit students. “You can’t skirt the law by outsourcing illegal conduct to your service providers,” FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Andrew Smith said.
The university is still profitable and markets aggressively to veterans online. Navy veteran and single mother Cheri Carter testified in February to the DOE she didn’t realize Colorado Tech’s medical billing and coding program wasn’t accredited until two weeks before she graduated.
“I couldn’t believe it. I had spent 14 months in an expensive program, and it turned out to be total junk,” Carter said. “I am unable to get my G.I. Bill Benefits restored, and I will never get back the time I spent.”
In 2020, Caldwell University paid a $5 million settlement after U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Craig Carpenito accused it of overcharging veterans for bogus courses and defrauding the U.S. Government out of more $24 million through the Post-9/11 Veterans Education Assistance Act.
In 2022, Retail Ready Career Center in Garland, Texas, reimbursed more than $137 million to student veterans.
Kill Bill
Most veterans who fritter away their G.I. Bill benefits to online diploma mills kiss their dollar bills goodbye forever, according to Veterans Education Success.
The university either shuts down or goes bankrupt before any meaningful oversight, or it merely keeps getting away with it. You don’t have to leave Phoenix to find examples of each.
In the example of ITT Technical Institute and its campus in West Phoenix, the school went belly-up in 2016 before it could allay students like Stephanie Pollay, an Air Force veteran who attended ITT in-person and online after her service ended in 2003.
For six years, she doled out money without learning anything about her field. All the while, unbeknownst to her, the school was accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, which was stripped of its authority after several rounds of scrutiny by the DOE.
“I had been scammed,” Pollay said. “My credit was ruined, I can’t get my G.I. Bill back and I lost an entire decade of my life struggling with the damage this caused.”
In the other example, DeVry University in Phoenix’s North Mountain Village might be the school most associated with churning out online diplomas (and the butt of many jokes) — look at satirist Tré Melvin’s 2014 sketch, “You went to DeVry, or you logged into DeVry? There’s a difference.”
Army National Guard veteran David Thibodeau used up his G.I. Bill and has $86,000 in outstanding student loans after studying video game programming at DeVry. In five years of study, he never once had a one-on-one conversation with an instructor.
He works the same job he had before he attended DeVry.
“While I did graduate and get my degree, it has not helped me,” Thibodeau said in a March email to American Veterans Magazine. “If anything, it has had the opposite effect. I’ve had potential employers kind of scoff at it.
For-profit colleges like DeVry were long incentivized to recruit veterans due to regulations requiring them to generate 10% of revenue from non-DOE sources.
G.I. Bill funds could contribute to this quota until recently.
‘Doesn’t mean shit’
DeVry enrolls 80,000 students and has a campus in Twentynine Palms, Calif., where Stutesman was stationed.
Stutesman is one of countless veterans hoping to see his G.I. Bill benefits restored for a second chance at an education. He wants to pursue a tech certificate at Western Governors University, an online college with a clean track record, but he can’t afford to take on any more debt, he said in an interview.
It’s uncertain how many eligible veterans would even use the benefits if they were restored. In 2018, after benefits were reinstated for veterans affected by college closures, only 1 in 5 eligible applicants applied within nine months.
But rest assured anyone involved with Veterans Education Success would cherish their second chance if offered one. That number grows, literally, by the day.
Just ask Adam Young, that aspiring video game developer from Gilbert. You know, the husband and father who loves his superhero posters.
Those heroes aren’t real. But American heroes, like him, are very real.
You wouldn’t think an experience in a virtual classroom can be so uncomfortable it overshadows the trauma of war. Yet, somehow, Young says his military service in Iraq “changed my life in many ways, for the better.”
And of his degree from Full Sail University?
“It doesn’t mean shit.”
