Corporate Greed Case Study: Grand Canyon University and Its Impact on Students and Consumers
The PhD Dream Becomes a Debt Nightmare
Imagine dedicating years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars to earning a doctoral degree, only to discover the finish line was a mirage.
You were told the program required 20 courses (or 60 credits). You signed an enrollment agreement that listed a “Total Program Tuition and Fees” of around $44,000.
Yet, as you neared the end of your coursework, you were told you had to enroll in and pay for an endless series of “continuation courses” that were never part of the original bargain.
Your savings evaporate. Your student debt balloons by another $10,000 or more. You are trapped, forced to pay for courses that involve no new instruction, just to continue the dissertation you were already working on.
This is the devastating reality the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges Grand Canyon University (GCU) created for the vast majority of its doctoral students. While students were trapped in a cycle of debt, millions of other Americans were allegedly being harassed by a relentless and illegal telemarketing operation designed to feed this very machine.
Please read until the end of this article for an important update on the case against Grand Canyon University and what it means for the future of regulatory compliance.
The Corporate Playbook: How the Harm Was Done
According to the FTC’s legal complaint, the harm inflicted on students and consumers was not an accident but the result of a deliberate corporate strategy built on two pillars of deception: misrepresenting the school’s identity and obscuring the true cost of its degrees.
The “Non-Profit” Shell Game
For years, Grand Canyon University’s marketing centered on a powerful, trust-building claim: it was a “non-profit” institution that had returned to its humble roots. This message was a “tremendous advantage,” as CEO Brian Mueller himself stated, helping recruiters get into high schools and convincing students who were wary of for-profit colleges to “pick up the phone”.
But the FTC alleges this was a carefully constructed fiction. In 2018, the university’s for-profit owner, Grand Canyon Education, Inc. (GCE), executed a maneuver where it transferred the “Grand Canyon University” name to a new non-profit entity, also run by Mueller.
However, a “Master Services Agreement” ensured the old for-profit company, GCE, would remain the exclusive provider of marketing, recruitment, student support, and technology services. The price for these services? A staggering 60% of GCU’s tuition and fee revenue.
The Department of Education later concluded that GCE and its stockholders—not the university—were the “primary beneficiaries” of this arrangement, stating it “violates the most basic tenet of nonprofit status”.
The Bait-and-Switch Doctorate
The second part of the playbook, according to the FTC, was to market doctoral programs as faster and cheaper than they actually were. GCU allegedly advertised “accelerated” programs that prospective students were told consisted of 20 courses and 60 credits. Enrollment agreements even specified a “Total Program Tuition and Fees” based on this 60-credit structure.
Yet, this was allegedly almost never the reality. The university’s dissertation process was a multi-level review gauntlet that, for nearly every student, required enrolling in additional, costly “continuation courses” not listed in the agreements.
These courses were a requirement to continue research and writing while under faculty supervision—a process often delayed by GCU’s own actions, like reassigning faculty or making inconsistent demands. The deception was baked into the system.
A Cascade of Consequences: The Real-World Impact
The corporate strategy detailed in the FTC complaint left a wake of financial and emotional destruction for students and created a nuisance for the general public.
Economic Ruin for Doctoral Students
The financial consequences for students were devastating. The data paints a grim picture of the alleged bait-and-switch:
| Metric | The Alleged Reality at GCU | |
| Students Needing Extra Courses | 98.5% of doctoral graduates | |
| Students Needing 5+ Extra Courses | 78% of graduates | |
| Students Needing 10+ Extra Courses | Over 50% of graduates | |
| Average Number of Courses | 31 (20 required + 11 continuation) | |
| Average Added Cost | Over $10,000 |
Many students, unable to afford the surprise costs, were forced to withdraw, leaving them with thousands of dollars in debt and no degree to show for it. They discovered the true cost only after investing years of their life and tuition payments, a point of maximum vulnerability.
The Harassment Machine: Abusive Telemarketing
To recruit students into these programs, GCE allegedly operated a massive telemarketing enterprise that flagrantly violated federal law. Telemarketers, who were told to identify as “GCU counselors,” were pressured to meet high-stakes enrollment quotas. This pressure allegedly led to millions of illegal calls.
The FTC asserts that GCE repeatedly called consumers who had specifically asked to be left alone and people who were on the
National Do Not Call Registry. The company allegedly did not even attempt to filter out these numbers from its systems until at least March 2023. The consent forms used to justify these calls were often buried in fine print, used pale, non-contrasting type, or were placed below the “submit” button, tactics the FTC has long advised are invalid.
A System Designed for This: Profit, Deregulation, and Power
The allegations against GCU are a symptom of a much larger disease within neoliberal capitalism, where essential public goods like education are transformed into commodities for financial extraction.
The for-profit education model, even when cloaked in a “non-profit” disguise, is engineered to prioritize shareholder returns over student outcomes.
The corporate structure separating GCE (the profit engine) from GCU (the academic facade) shows how financial engineering can create systems that are legally complex but morally bankrupt. This setup allowed GCE to report to investors that it would continue to profit from GCU’s revenue stream, a stream fed directly by student tuition and federal student loans.
CEO Brian Mueller served as President of the “non-profit” university while simultaneously acting as CEO and Chairman of the for-profit GCE. His compensation was explicitly tied to GCE’s financial performance, aligning his interests directly with those of stockholders, not students. This is the logical endpoint of a system that views education not as a social good but as another market to be exploited.
Dodging Accountability: A Cost of Doing Business
The alleged misconduct was not a secret. According to the FTC, the defendants continued their deceptive practices despite lawsuits and investigations by the Department of Education. GCE only took steps to curtail its abusive telemarketing after the FTC served it with a Civil Investigative Demand, forcing the company to acknowledge the scope of its violations.
This pattern of behavior—ignoring rules until forced to comply by regulators—reveals a chilling business calculation. The potential profits from misleading students and harassing consumers were deemed worth the risk of getting caught. When accountability is merely a line item in a budget, fines become just another cost of doing business, not a deterrent to systemic harm.
Reclaiming Power: Pathways to Real Change
Solving this problem requires more than a single lawsuit. It demands systemic reform aimed at dismantling the predatory architecture of for-profit education and strengthening consumer protections.
- Ban Predatory For-Profit Models: We must challenge legal structures that allow for-profit companies to capture revenue from non-profit institutions, especially when that revenue comes from taxpayer-funded student aid.
- Enforce the Do Not Call Registry with Severe Penalties: The flagrant disregard for consumer privacy alleged in this case shows that current enforcement is insufficient. Fines must be large enough to be punitive, not just a nuisance.
- Mandate Radical Transparency in Higher Education: All universities, regardless of tax status, must be required to provide a standardized, simple disclosure form detailing the total estimated cost of a degree, including the average number of additional courses and time to completion for recent graduates.
This case is a troubling reminder that in a deregulated capitalist system, the pursuit of profit will inevitably trample the public good unless communities and regulators reclaim their power and demand true corporate accountability.
What On Earth Just Happened???
I’m writing this article on August 19th, 2025. On August 15th, The FTC dismissed the claim against Grand Canyon University with prejudice. With prejudice means that a future judge can’t rule on this case, so GCU was basically given a free pass here.
There was no explanation given on either side about why this case just vanished into the aether except for a comment on Grand Canyon University’s website:
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted unanimously today to dismiss its lawsuit against Grand Canyon University’s largest service provider — Grand Canyon Education — and Brian Mueller, ending years of coordinated lawfare by government officials under the Biden Administration against the largest Christian university in the country.
Look. We both know that the current federal agencies are completely captured by the MAGA ideology, so excuse me for not believing this whole “Brandon was targeting this good Christian university out of hatred in his heart against Christians despite being a practicing Catholic man himself”.
I also have my own reasons for hating Biden. For one, he handed Trump a free electoral victory by not dropping out of the presidential race until it was too late and more importantly, he’s spent his entire life actively supporting the genocide against Palestinians.
But Joe Biden never let his own ideological beliefs dictate who his administration would target, and let donations dictate who was able to buy legal leeway.
I don’t believe for a second that the FTC was specifically targeting Grand Canyon University for the specific purpose of being a private Christian college. If anything, that’s some Trump shit. And nobody with any common sense believes this official FTC line either.
All factual claims in this article were derived from the First Amended Complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission in the case of Federal Trade Commission v. Grand Canyon Education, Inc., et al.
The FTC has a press release about the dismissal of this case: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/08/statement-ftc-grand-canyon-university-case
Our outlook does not look good if Trump’s regulatory agencies are going to continue being this blatant about favortism.
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