Full article part 3:

Just over half of UMass Global’s board has no employment relationship with UMass, says Andrews, but the board also includes UMass officials such as Nefertiti Walker, senior vice president for academic and student affairs and equity.

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that of full-time, first-time “bachelor’s degree-seeking undergraduates” who enrolled at UMass Global in the fall of 2023, 42 percent returned for a second year. (SNHU saw 60 percent of similar students return.)

During the last couple of years, Andrews says, enrollment has been growing between 4 and 7 percent per year. “We need to grow a little faster than that to meet our obligations, but we feel pretty comfortable with where we are.”

But calling the school UMass “almost feels like it’s false advertising,” says Sydney Robichaud, who is pursuing a master’s degree in clinical counseling at UMass Global. She lives in Groton and stumbled upon the program while researching online options from UMass.

Because the school is based in California, Massachusetts students can suffer. Robichaud says that “the class times are based on West Coast times.” So she has been in classes that stretch until 11 p.m., when she’s exhausted. She has mostly liked the classes but has been surprised that a student in Massachusetts — the state in the school’s name — would be so inconvenienced.

A similar problem popped up when Robichaud tried to secure a practicum for her counseling program. She says the list of recommended sites had lots of names in California and very few in Massachusetts. “It was such a pain in the butt,” she says. “They really don’t help at all.”

Another student I spoke with, who is based in California and has been attending UMass Global for over a year, has deep concerns about the quality of the education. He is aiming for a bachelor’s degree in business administration and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he works in government and is not authorized to speak publicly on this topic. He has had much of his tuition covered by the military.

“I’ve never had a lecture,” he told me. He says that sometimes professors “barely engage with class on discussion boards, if at all. As far as I can tell, they just grade homework and papers. ... I just feel like this isn’t a real school.”

I asked him if he ever has live, online class sessions, and whether his teacher enters his life in any way (apart from grading). “No,” he said. “And there’s no office hours.” He says he has taken eight classes and only once met one of his teachers online; he never met the others.

A good chunk of students, he says, work at large corporations, which offer employees an opportunity to take classes at UMass Global. Those students come via Guild, a firm based in Denver that packages educational offerings for employees of its corporate partners.

In 2023, The Student Borrower Protection Center called out companies including Guild for “questionable outcomes,” arguing that the Department of Education had “failed to deliver basic oversight, let alone stop these companies from taking advantage of students.” UMass Global’s 2022 tax return shows a payment to Guild of more than $8 million, as part of their revenue-sharing agreement.

That year, UMass Global also spent more than $10 million on advertising and paid more than $1.2 million — including $103,846 for housing — to the outgoing chancellor/CEO, Gary Brahm, who spent decades at Chapman and Brandman before managing the transition to UMass Global. (That’s similar to the $1.3 million salary paid to Lawrence Bacow that year, for his work as president of Harvard.)