University of Arizona Global Campus: Why Such a Massive Ad Spend?

When the typical cost of enrolling an on-campus student at a state university is less than $300, why would a public university division spend more than $34,000 to enroll a single undergraduate from Facebook?

Or more than $33,000 to enroll a single graduate student from LinkedIn? Or more than $11,500 on average to enroll undergraduates from its top five online sources?

In 2024, EY, the Big Four accounting firm previously known as Ernst & Young, prepared a confidential analysis of online education at the University of Arizona for the school’s governing body, the Arizona Board of Regents. The university only disclosed EY’s report following a public records request filed by the Arizona Luminaria in June.

Among American universities, this institution is unique in that it operates not one, but two online program divisions. Its Arizona Online division was gradually built in-house by the university and now educates more than 9,000 students. But in 2020 the university bought Ashford University and rebranded it as the University of Arizona Global Campus, or UAGC. This division operates separately from Arizona Online.

The EY audit’s Exhibit G on Page 36 reveals that the costs paid by the UAGC division to enroll students are staggering. In part, that’s because almost all—85 percent—of online leads that convert into enrollments at UAGC are paid instead of organic (free). By contrast, at Arizona Online, only about half of the enrollments are paid.

Because on average fewer than one percent of those reached through campaigns on the top five platforms, such as Google and Facebook, actually enroll, EY discovered that the University of Arizona pays $11,521 for each UAGC admit from those platforms. And that sum roughly equals the annual sticker price for the University of Arizona’s in-state tuition and fees paid by an on-campus undergraduate, which is $13,000.

In fact, the best-performing online source converts only three percent of prospects into admits for UAGC. That means a single enrollment from that platform—Google—costs the university $7,551.

To be sure, Arizona Online is also paying some hefty costs for admits on certain platforms, like their $30,000-plus costs paid to LinkedIn for both graduate and undergraduate enrollments. But the top five ad platforms for Arizona Online cost about $4,500 less per admit than on UAGC—or about 39 percent—and only half of those enrollments result from paid online leads.

Now, if these specific examples of enrollment costs paid by UAGC and Arizona Online seem outrageous, consider the overall enrollment costs paid by each division.

In June 2024, a nonpartisan think tank based in Phoenix that calls itself the Grand Canyon Institute analyzed EY’s data. Grand Canyon warned the university that UAGC is so heavily dependent on paid advertising to generate conversions that overall marketing expenses amount to a whopping $5,398 on average for each undergraduate student who ends up enrolling. By contrast, GCI reports that Arizona Online only spends about $1,500 per enrolled undergraduate.

For comparison, the national average for public colleges and universities is only $282 per enrolled student, according to a 2022 survey conducted by the higher education consulting firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz, or RNL. In other words, “Arizona Online is paying five times as much as a typical public university to enroll a student and UAGC is paying more than 15 times as much to do so,” says the Grand Canyon report entitled “Exorbitant Costs, Little Benefit: $5,000 Marketing Cost Per Student at UAGC with Low Academic Success.”

Now, why would UAGC need to spend such exorbitant costs to attract students? In a February 2024 interview on KAET-TV in Phoenix, Dr. Dave Wells, the research director at the Grand Canyon Institute, argues that UAGC doesn’t offer a competitive product when compared with the online divisions of other flagship state universities. And he further argues that the University of Arizona has done little to upgrade the former Ashford University’s dismal educational quality or dreadful image as the most notorious, predatory brand in higher education.

That’s because the University of Arizona created UAGC by buying Ashford for one dollar and rebranding it. U of A re-hired most of its employees, then enabled the school to continue operating as a separate, wholly-owned subsidiary with a business model aligned with for-profit recruitment practices instead of those traditionally employed by nonprofit universities. In other words, under the hood, UAGC is still the same old Ashford University.

In its crowning achievement in support of college student rights, in January 2025, the Biden Administration discharged $4.5 billion in student loans for 261,000 borrowers who were former students defrauded by Ashford. As we explained in several articles here on OnlineEducation.com, Ashford was one of the worst for-profit colleges in terms of deceptive recruiting tactics and poor educational quality.

A California criminal court convicted Ashford and its parent company, Zovio, of fraud for lying to potential students about accreditation and financial aid, then fined the school $22 million. After that verdict was upheld on appeal, California’s Department of Justice asked the U.S. Department of Education to discharge all the student loans for Ashford’s former students nationwide.

ED said that the state attorney general’s office had asked for the discharges because of evidence developed through its criminal litigation “around widespread misrepresentations in nine separate areas, including students’ ability to obtain needed licensure, transfer credits, the cost and amount of financial aid, and the time it would take to earn a degree.” The Department also said it had reviewed California’s evidence independently before approving the state’s request.

Attorney David Halperin, the Republic Report’s editor, points out that Ashford had been investigated or sued by at least seven other federal and state law enforcement agencies. They include the U.S. Department of Justice, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, along with the attorneys general of Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina.

In a statement, former Undersecretary of Education James Kvaal—the Biden Administration’s top higher education official—said that “numerous federal and state investigations have documented the deceptive recruiting tactics frequently used by Ashford University. In reality, 90 percent of Ashford students never graduated, and the few who did were often left with large debts and low incomes.”

As we covered last February, in 2023, Kvaal’s department signaled at the time that it might have required the University of Arizona to pay some of the costs of a $72 million borrower defense to repayment discharge of Ashford’s loans. “The [$4.5 billion] discharge being announced today expands on that relief to cover additional borrowers,” the Department said in a news release.

Halperin says that the practical effect of the latest discharge means that a much larger set of Ashford borrowers will receive automatic relief. That means they won’t need to invest hours of time and effort applying for relief, potentially, and then proving their cases. ED claimed it had notified those borrowers of their automatic discharges through email messages during the last weeks of the Biden Administration.

Responding to questions about the University of Arizona’s potential liability, the university’s spokespeople have repeatedly argued that their institution had “no relationship” with Ashford during the enrollment period covered by the $72 million or $4.5 billion discharges. But higher education industry analyst Phil Hill disagrees. Hill said in a LinkedIn post that the $4.5 billion discharge “could put the University of Arizona on the hook for huge, huge sums based on borrower defense.”

Halperin concurred with Hill. “Today’s announcement creates an even greater risk of liability for the state school. U of A has denied it would be responsible, but its purchase agreement with Zovio suggests otherwise,” Halperin writes.

This report wouldn’t be complete without mentioning one decidedly unexpected twist to the UAGC story. In what might be the only instance in history of an academic recommending students not to enroll in one of his university’s divisions, a University of Arizona professor in December 2024 wrote a controversial op-ed for Inside Higher Ed advising potential students not to enroll at UAGC.

That academic is Dr. Nolan Cabrera, a high-profile tenured professor in U of A’s Center for the Study of Higher Education. Dr. Cabrera is an expert on racism within higher education and the author of Whiteness in the Ivory Tower, published by Columbia University’s Teachers College Press in 2024.

Dr. Cabrera wrote his op-ed as a private citizen and not in his official capacity as a university employee. Nevertheless, the opening to his letter is startling:

If you are thinking about enrolling in the University of Arizona Global Campus—don’t!

I’m speaking with you as a professor at the UA who has seen this disaster unfold, and I cannot be quiet any longer. I care too deeply about students who are potentially wasting thousands of dollars on an education that does not live up to its promise.