Don't be deceived by the slick ads and high-pitched sales tactics used by the Internet's "premier" for-profit nonline school, Capella University - it is highly recommended that you take a look at this site, first, before you spend a huge amount of money for an "education." Visitors will find comments from Capella students and former students who have been scammed into thinking that they could receive a quality education online. While the concept is good, it is our belief that Capella University falls far short of anything that resembles a quality education. Capella seems to be more interested in bilking extremely high tuition fees out of unsuspecting students than in providing a quality education. As an entirely nonline school, it must be assumed that Capella's overhead is extremely low in comparison to real "brick and mortar" universities that have classrooms to maintain.

This site will also serve to document what is, in our opinion, Capella's abuse and harassment of students, who often pay more than $1,600 per course for speaking out about Capella's substandard practices. Yes, this site is designed to provide a one-sided view as we believe that students who rightly express their opinions at Capella are subject to harassment, retaliation, and intimidation by school officials. We also believe that the same unethical officials and instructors who engage in censoring materials that are posted in Capella's "classrooms," as well as in other areas of their site, act in direct opposition to the concept of the First Amendment and Academic Freedom.

Capella University recently decided to implement a new, nonline "learning environment," WebCT, with just two of their "schools" (we use that term loosely) - the School of Technology and the School of Business. While there is a tremendous amount of information on the Internet regarding WebCT's long history of not being accessible to all students, Capella University simply ignored the obvious. Instead, Capella claims to have spent more than a year "researching" WebCT and that their "pilot study" was overwhelmingly positive. In the now infamous "apology" from Capella's President, Michael Offerman, dated April 9, 2004, he stated:

"The situation arose unexpectedly as we implemented a planned, phased migration of learners to the new Courseroom from our current learning platform, LearningSpace. The new learning platform is a software product called Vista from WebCT, one of the nation's leading providers of premier e-learning solutions. We conducted several months of testing and analysis of Vista, including a pilot in March [2004] with more than 250 learners and faculty. During testing and pilot periods, we encountered no technical issues. In fact, learners and faculty in our pilot universally praised Vista for being exceptionally user-friendly and intuitive, and providing new and useful online learning tools."

Since then, Offerman has buried his head in the sand and has refused to communicate any further with students who are rightfully disgusted at the ongoing problems they continue to experience with WebCT - constant down times, inability to post, lack of support, inability to edit (hey, wait a minute, it is now known that Capella University can delete posts, why can't students edit or delete their own posts?), etc. Additional details will be provided as this site develops.

At this time, it is known that at least one student has filed a complaint against Capella with the United States Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) on charges that WebCT denies equal access to students with disabilities.

If you have been subject to abuse by school officials or incompetent instructors, Capella University Sucks.us strongly encourages your comments.

Please come back often as this site grows.

Find out some of the latest scandals by visiting our Updates Page.