Raymond Sewer said he had good reason to believe that the California Institute of Technology would be deeply involved in the cloud computing “boot camp”.

Caltech’s website touted the online programme, and the school’s orange logo appeared on the promised certificates of completion.

“I was just like, ‘Ah, man, this has got to be legit,’” said Sewer, 46, who works in Denver and enrolled in the $9,000 programme to try to leave the mortgage industry.

But after Sewer signed up, he said that Caltech was almost nowhere to be found. Sewer said his primary instructor, who sometimes vanished during class sessions, lived in Mississippi, not Southern California. A course facilitator, he said, was in India. Neither had any meaningful ties to Caltech, which Sewer had known as an academic powerhouse and a backdrop of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

The university, he learned, had largely outsourced the programme to a company called Simplilearn.

“It was just a bunch of bogus,” Sewer scoffed in an interview. “They just wanted our money.”

Caltech, a private university in Pasadena, California, is a highly selective school, but some of its online programmes make it merely part of the crowd. Colleges across the country are routinely offering online, nondegree-granting programmes that they tout as avenues to offer more educational opportunities to broader audiences. But the programmes are largely unregulated and may not feature university faculty members or their curriculums.

A spokesperson for Caltech, Shayna Chabner, said that the university viewed its online programmes as “a way that we can bring value” and expertise to the ideal of lifelong learning. Simplilearn’s chief marketing officer, Mark Moran, said the company’s programmes “help thousands of professionals advance their careers”.

Other online programmes have also faced recent pressure. In a June report, California’s state auditor faulted the University of California system for insufficient oversight of outside firms involved in online education. And Minnesota recently passed legislation to limit the ties of its public universities to online programme managers.

At least 600 colleges and universities in the US have used online-programme management companies, according to data compiled by the market research firm ListEdTech.

Although some universities have begun to rethink their approaches, colleges can earn several thousand dollars for each enrolled student.

At least some of those students became deeply disillusioned.

Elva Lopez was online in 2020 and saw a pop-up advertisement for a Caltech-branded cybersecurity programme, according to a class-action lawsuit that she filed last year that accused the university and Simplilearn of violating consumer-protection laws.

After requesting more information, she received an email from an admissions adviser whose address matched Caltech’s in Pasadena. She was admitted and arranged for $14,000 in loans.

Lopez, according to a court filing, soon learned that one of her instructors was not a Caltech professor but a recently minted graduate of the same cybersecurity programme.

Few US universities have the influence of Caltech, which manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for Nasa. The university trumpets 46 Nobel laureates in its ranks, and 110 fellows of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In at least seven consecutive years, it has reported at least $3 billion in revenue.

In May 2020, it announced a partnership with Fullstack Academy, which Simplilearn eventually acquired. The company’s co-chief executive said then that the agreement would give students “access to some of the world’s brightest educators”. Chabner, the Caltech spokesperson, said this month that the university, having recognised that a contractor might be able to tap new audiences, had picked the company because of its track record with blue-chip corporations and universities.

Chabner, who declined to discuss details of Caltech’s financial arrangements with Simplilearn, said the university had about 50 distinct online course titles but that only eight were associated with the company. About 500 people a year participate in the Simplilearn programmes, she said.

The company has used high-pressure sales tactics. Students described calls that dangled time-conditioned discounts with a sense of pushiness and urgency. And some students said the calls leaned on the majesty of Caltech. Many students said they were aware that they would not be traditional students — “I’m not a physicist or anything like that,” Sewer said — but they believed that Caltech would play a central role in the programmes.

They interpreted language like “powered by Simplilearn” as an expression of the technology platform they would be using, not as a signal that a company representative would be teaching.

Simplilearn’s founder and chief executive, Krishna Kumar, said in an email on September 5 that he was “happy to get on a call” but did not respond to follow-up messages, including one that detailed The Times’s reporting. Instead, Moran, the chief marketing officer, sent a series of statements, including one that began: “We are proud of the digital-skills services we provide and fully stand behind the programmes offered in collaboration” with Caltech.

New York Times News Service