Complaint Review: Grand Canyon University - Phoenix Arizona

I attended this school online from Spring of 2009 to the fall of 2011, in order to get a Master's degree in Special Education. I completed all requirements, despite having to deal with indifference, incompetence and dishonesty from several different departments. I have a 4.0 and exemplary references/reviews from all of the teachers I completed practicums or student teaching with.

Several times, in order for people in departments such as Field Experience to do their job, I had to drive down to the campus and speak to the department heads in person. If I had been in another state, I would not have been able to get any placements for practicums or student teaching. I was told by the department head that "worker A" could not return phone calls or emails for weeks because "she had an illness in her family" when her replacement, "worker B" also failed to return emails or phone calls, months later, I again drove down there, and was given the same exact excuse.

The personnel changes are really amazing, I have lost count of how many academic advisers and finance counselors I have had since I started.

My online professors (they call them course facilitators) ran the gamut from absolutely useless to dedicated and gifted.

The quality of education here is lacking. All of the schools where I completed my practicums had extremely low expectations of me if they had any prior experience with other students from this school. I was plagiarized by classmates who couldn't even write on an eighth grade level, let alone at a graduate level. Lesson plans which garnered "A's" in my class were useless in the real world. I was delayed a semester in getting my student teaching placement because the office of field experience didn't feel like processing my application, since they felt they had too much work to do (I am not making this up).

Finally, after fighting issue after issue at this place, I finished with a 4.0, only to be told, three weeks from graduating, that since they had rejected much of my federal financial aid, and sent some of it that I had already received back to the government, that I needed to come up with $2156.00. They pulled this scam on a number of my classmates, with surprise bills ranging from 1 to over 4 thousand dollars. There were six people in my class of about 17 who contacted me and told me that this had been done to them. The school lied to me for months, and were very condescending. They told me my balance would be taken care of, and it would have been if they hadn't played games with my student loan money. I was told, as are many of the victims of this particular scam, that they awarded me too much money the year before. Once they had my $150.00 graduation fee, they decided to tell me that they needed a "student contribution" in order for me to graduate.

The reason they do this to hundreds, if not thousands of students is that they are trying to hide the true cost of going there by shifting the debt burden from student loans, which the government is scrutinizing right now, to other debt forms, such as credit cards. They do this at the very end, when you are desperate to finish up. If they were truly Christians, they would not treat people this way. If they were a legitimate university, they wouldn't have to stoop to such shifty methods. The financial counselor I had, three or four financial counselors ago told me that the school deliberately cut student loan money in people's last semester on purpose, in order to "minimize the student loan debt people were graduating with."

I have degrees from other schools where I also received financial aid, I have never seen such behavior. I may not be able to get my hard earned degree, which is a disaster for me. I hope at least that I can warn other potential victims away from this school.

If you are planning to graduate from this school, ignore whatever they tell you, and have thousands of dollars on hand for the last minute shakedown. They will deny it and deny it until they have you where they want you. If you can get out of this school, do so. If you are looking for an online school, I suggest you keep looking. I read multiple posts and emails from other students in my classes who have been poorly treated by this university, which appears to care only for stockholders, and not its students.