A student who paid thousands for a tech boot camp said it was “a Caltech program in name only.”
The California Institute of Technology has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused it of misleading students who signed up for a “boot camp” that carried Caltech’s name but in practice had scant ties to the school, one of the world’s richest universities.
The settlement called for Caltech and an outside partner, Simplilearn, to change how they advertised the boot camp, adding new restrictions that threatened the program’s allure. But on Monday, the day a court released documents that detailed the settlement’s terms, Caltech said in an open letter it would cut ties with Simplilearn later this year.
Nevertheless, the settlement, which still requires a judge’s approval, may influence how other schools market similar offerings.
Caltech is among hundreds of universities across the country, many of them looking for new sources of revenue, that have licensed their names to promote courses that were actually run by outside companies, with the university often playing only limited roles in hiring, instruction or curriculum development.
Some universities earn several thousand dollars for each student who enrolls in a branded program; researchers estimate that those fees add up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year across the higher education industry.
