In a powerful legal complaint filed this month in federal court in Denver, Aidan Peters, a former admissions representative for Colorado Technical University (CTU), alleges that the for-profit, online school, owned by giant Perdoceo Education Corp., systematically deceived and abused students.

One such student identified in the complaint is T.G., a woman who seemed to lack a basic understanding of her dealings with the school and could barely read and write. Peters needed to spend hours on the phone with T.G., telling her what to write on the online forms the school required for enrollment and how to spell each word. Like many students that CTU recruited, T.G. also seemed to lack access to a computer capable of allowing her to participate in coursework. 

Two members of CTU’s senior management team had their offices close to Peters’ cubicle, and according to Peters, these two executives were aware of T.G. “and her situation.” They could overhear her calls with Peters, and Peters would discuss the calls and T.G.’s limitations with one of them. Peters says his direct managers also knew. 

T.G. could never remember Peters’ name and would often call him “Ed.” This sad state of affairs somehow became a source of amusement in the CTU office, where colleagues started calling Peters “Ed” as a joke. 

According to Peters’ complaint, T.G., like many other CTU students “ended up predictably failing out of CTU—after all, she had no access to a computer or the basic competencies to succeed.” 

But T.G.’s case was especially notable because after she dropped out, “she called in and said she wanted to kill herself because of it” and “it sounded like she was already formulating a plan to do so…”  Peters called the police to have them do a wellness check.

And then, somehow, CTU recruited T.G. again. And she failed out again. 

Instead of seeing T.G.’s case as a example of what not to do, according to Peters, “CTU management held her up in meetings when discussing how to push the more ‘challenging students’ into classes.”

T.G.’s story is particularly troubling, but in many ways similar to the cases of numerous other students that Peters describes in the complaint. Many CTU students, Peters’ complaint alleges, “were not fully aware of what was happening and probably lacked the cognitive capacity to understand the forms they were being asked to sign. But recruiters enrolled and started these student anyway.” As far as CTU management was concerned, that was the appropriate course, Peters claims.

“The only thing that CTU would have punished [Peters] for,” with regard to T.G., the complaint says, is if he had decided not to enroll her.

Peters filed his lawsuit under the Federal False Claims Act, under which whistleblowers, acting in the name of taxpayers, seek to recoup money allegedly taken from the government through fraud. If the case results in a court win or settlement, the whistleblower gets a share of the recovery.

After such a complaint is filed, the U.S. Department of Justice must review the claims and decide whether to enter the case on the side of the whistleblower. A November 10, 2025, order from the Colorado court disclosed that the Trump Justice Department has not joined Peters’ case, a critical decision that sometimes leads a False Claims Act whistleblower to drop a lawsuit altogether. But Peters’ lawyer, Brandon Mark, has proceeded, filing an amended complaint on January 8 after the case was unsealed.

The court has directed Perdoceo to file a response to the complaint by March 16, 2026. 

Perdoceo did not respond to our request for comment on the allegations in Peters’ lawsuit.

But Peters’ allegations are similar to those I have heard directly from Peters since I began speaking with him in early 2020 — and consistent with accounts I heard from more than a dozen other employees of CTU and of Perdoceo’s other big online school, American Intercontinental University (AIU), over several years.

Perdoceo has faced multiple federal and state law enforcement actions and investigations over a decade for deceptive and predatory practices directed primarily at lower-income Americans — single mothers, people of color, veterans, immigrants, the elderly, and others striving for a better future. The company, which has taken in billions in taxpayer-funded federal student aid, has also produced dismal outcomes for many students, leaving dropouts and graduates alike buried in debt and without the careers they sought.

The 2010s saw major congressional and media investigations of such abuses by for-profit colleges. The scandal led the Obama administration to issue significant regulations to curb deceptive and predatory practices. It also led to major law enforcement actions, and actions by private accrediting agencies, against big for-profit chains. Some of those chains, including Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, EDMC, Zovio, and CEHE, eventually shut down as a result. But other huge operations, including the University of Phoenix, Adtalem, Grand Canyon, Kaplan (now converted to Purdue Global), and Perdoceo, have survived despite the law enforcement and media probes. The fact that the first Trump administration, with Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education, cancelled most of the Obama accountability measures and facilitated, for some operations, fake conversions to non-profit status, threw a lifeline to some of the predatory schools that had hung around. 

The lawsuit’s allegations against Perdoceo

Aidan Peters — a person I have come to know as smart, observant, resourceful, and determined — started at CTU as an admissions advisor in June 2016. His complaint says that the mission CTU gave him was “unmistakable”: he was required to “enroll students by any means necessary…. {H]e was trained and conditioned by management at CTU to be a master manipulator whose only objective was to make more students start (and stay in) classes. Pressure from management came from the top down, and with each layer of management came an additional level of pressure…. Recruiters were pitted against one another and pushed to break rules and cross lines into unacceptable behavior.”

Peters also was given an “Expected Student Population” target of approximately seven student enrollments for the first recruiting session; there were eight such sessions per year.

CTU, according to Peters, demanded that every recruit “be a one call conclusion, which meant that the students had completed the necessary paperwork to begin school immediately in a single phone call with a CTU recruiter.” The complaint explains, “CTU’s thought was that the longer the prospective student considered enrolling, the less likely they were to attend.”

CTU armed recruiters with dossiers on each recruit — information gleaned about their families, their fears, their hopes, their goals — and trained the recruiters “to use the personal information about the student to manipulate them into enrollment.” Recruiters were guided “to use shaming and embarrassment” to get students to sign up or stay enrolled.

On a conference call, a senior recruiting director told recruiters to dismiss concerns about an applicant’s suitability for a program: “Be mindful of not looking for the perfect enrollment…. We’re not the land of perfection. . . . If there’s any sort of cautionary, you know, red flags during the interview, it doesn’t matter.”

Peters alleges that CTU management would tell recruiters that prospective students “do not know who you are, so be someone else if needed just get them to enroll. Act as if you are in a position of authority while speaking so a student will do what you say.” CTU told recruiters to give an “Oscar-worthy performance” when seeking to persuaded people to sign up.

A CTU vice president told recruiters to “remove [them]selves from [their] own values and ethics while at work.”

CTU had three tiers of recruiters, and moving up a tier meant a higher salary. When Peters asked his supervisor how we could get a promotion, she explained “that if he wanted to earn a promotion to one of the higher recruiting tiers and make more money, he had to enroll more students.”  The complaint adds, “It was clear that the additional compensation was in exchange for the additional student enrollments.”

Peters’ lawyer argues in the complaint that this approach to promotions and salaries violated the ban in federal law on such incentive compensation schemes for colleges that participate in the federal student aid program. The purpose of this Incentive Compensation Ban is to deter colleges from aggressively recruiting students who are unlikely to benefit from a school’s programs.

(In December, another giant for-profit education operation, Grand Canyon, paid $28 million to settle False Claims Act charges based on a similar claim of Incentive Compensation violations.)

The complaint also charges that CTU found many prospects through third-party lead generator companies, who themselves used deceptive bait-and-switch tactics to lure people onto phone calls — people who were unhoused, in nursing homes, without a computer, and people who entered their information online because they thought they were applying for a job or for government benefits. Veterans also were lured by false promises about the benefits they would receive and the ultimate costs of their educations.  Peters alleges that CTU management “expressly forbade recruiters from correcting those misimpressions.” He says CTU trained recruiters to suggest that enrolling at CTU would be the first step in obtaining the job they sought. 

Peters’ complaint further describes how CTU “made it almost impossible” for a student to unenroll.  Recruiters were trained to “persuade (or trick)” a student to enter a single word or even a single number or letter into an online discussion board, which locked them into classes. Once that happened, CTU recruiters were trained to tell students there was nothing they could do to facilitate withdrawal and that the student had to speak to a “student success coach,” who also was trained to prevent a student from withdrawing. Students who tried to withdraw by email received a response that they had to withdraw by phone. If they tried that, a management official would come on the line  and pressure the student not to cancel. If the student persisted in seeking to cancel, Perdoceo representatives would call them six to seven times a day for two to three weeks, pressing the student to just post “Hi” on a discussion board so they would stay enrolled.

Peters says he became a “well-rewarded, successful recruiter and retention expert” at CTU, and managers gave him high-quality leads, meaning prospective students who were deemed more likely to enroll. 

But all that changed when Peters finally went to his bosses with concerns about the ethics of CTU practices. He says he was then told “this is a for profit college. If you want to work with a college that cares more about setting students up right and that is not solely focused on enrolling students, you should work in admissions in a nonprofit college or public college.”

Soon after, in January 2019, Perdoceo agreed to pay $494 million to settle charges by 48 state attorneys general that the company was engaged in deceptive acts. As part of that settlement, a former state attorney general was appointed to monitor commitments made by Perdoceo to change its recruiting practices. That development motivated Peters to more forcefully raise concerns about, and refuse to engage in, predatory conduct. Peters alleges that, in response, “CTU insisted that [he] continue to engage in all the same deceptive and misleading practices as before.” He adds, “If anything, after these settlements were announced, CTU managed to become even more deceptive and toxic.” 

Peters says that after he declared his refusal to stop using deceptive tactics, CTU stopped providing him with quality leads. He resigned, in November 2020, because, the complaint says, “he could no longer participate in defrauding students, which is exactly what CTU required of him.”

Perdoceo’s disgraceful record

Peters’ damning account is far from an outlier in terms of Perdoceo’s overall record. As Republic Report has chronicled for over a decade, Perdoceo, which until January 2020 was called Career Education Corp., has been one of the worst actors in all of higher education, taking in billions from taxpayers for student grants and loans while repeatedly engaging in predatory abuses.

Like Donald Trump’s own fraudulent Trump University, Perdoceo has faced multiple law enforcement investigations for deceptive, illegal conduct.

In 2019, as Peters’ complaint notes, the company entered into a $494 million settlement with 48 state attorneys general, plus the District of Columbia, over allegations that it engaged in widespread deceptive practices against students. (New York state was not part of that action; it already had, in 2013, settled with the company, which agreed to pay $10.25 million to resolve New York’s claims that the company, in its student recruiting, exaggerated its graduates’ job placement rates.)

Later in 2019, the company agreed to pay $30 million to settle charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission that its schools have recruited students through deceptive third-party lead generation operations — abuses that Peters describes in his own complaint.

In each of these settlements, Perdoceo did not admit guilt.

But from 2020 to 2022, numerous Perdoceo employees, including Peters, told media outlets USA Today and Capitol Forum, as well as Republic Report, that company recruiters continued to feel pressure to make misleading sales pitches and to enroll low-income people into programs that aren’t strong enough to help them succeed. Some of those former employees, including Peters, also spoke with federal investigators.

USA Today reported in 2022 that the U.S. Department of Education, in December 2021, requested information from Perdoceo; the Department also asked Perdoceo to retain records regarding student recruiting, marketing, financial aid practices, and more. Perdoceo confirmed the probe, while seeming to minimize its significance, in a February 2022 SEC filing. Perdoceo also acknowledged in May 2022 that it received a request for documents and information from the U.S. Justice Department.

It appears that those federal probes of Perdoceo eventually stalled. 

So Perdoceo remains in operation, and its schools — CTU and AIU — remain fully accredited by the giant accreditor Higher Learning Commission (which also accredits the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan) and remain eligible for federal student aid from the U.S. departments of education, defense, and veterans affairs.

The Department of Education provided AIU and CTU with more than $570 million in student grants and loans in the 2023-24 school year, the most recent year that was reported. A bachelor’s degree from CTU is priced at about $66,000.

But data released by the Department in 2023 show that Perdoceo’s two schools, AIU and CTU, deliver poor results for students, with low graduation rates and graduate incomes and high levels of student debt.

Before joining Perdoceo, company CEO Todd Nelson ran two of the other biggest for-profit colleges operations: the University of Phoenix and now-demised Education Management Corp. Both of those chains, like Perdoceo, ran into major law enforcement troubles because of deceptive recruiting practices and other abuses that occurred on Nelson’s watch.

Federal records show that Perdoceo, so heavily dependent on government largesse, donated $50,000 to the 2025 Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee. 

CTU currently faces a separate False Claims Act case also pending in the federal court in Denver. A former academic program director at CTU sued the company in 2021, alleging that CTU manipulated its proprietary Intellipath education software to allow students to navigate through course requirements while putting in only a fraction of the hours of instruction that federal law requires, thus making it easier for students to pass their courses and stay enrolled — and for CTU to keep hauling in federal aid. The Justice Department has not joined that action either, but in January 2024 the presiding judge denied CTU’s motion to dismiss. The case is still pending, CTU having filed various motions and appeals aiming to derail a trial.