These Students Thought They Were Making an Investment in Their Future. They Spent Everything They Had. Then the Worst Happened.

This story about cybersecurity training was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Looking back, there were a lot of warning signs.

Christopher Collins fielded several calls a day from recruiters with IronCircle, a cybersecurity boot camp provider, urging him to enroll in its online courses. Once he did, they often didn’t function properly, and the help desk was slow to fix issues, he said. He recalled seeing posts on the program’s message boards from graduates saying they couldn’t find work.

But Collins had agreed to a roughly $5,500 payment plan that he would be on the hook for even if he dropped the class. The program was offered through the University of Central Florida, which he felt gave it legitimacy. And returning to his old truck-driving job wasn’t an option because of an injury. He decided to stick it out.

Until the day in June when he couldn’t log in. In emails to Collins, IronCircle first said that a technical issue was to blame, then that fixing the program “remains our top priority.”

By that point, IronCircle was eight days into a liquidation process.

To its critics, including many former students who feel misled by the company, the sudden closure of IronCircle may seem a fitting culmination to its eight years of operation. The company, which had gone through two name changes in that time, regularly charged students as much as $18,900 for classes and then failed to help them get cybersecurity jobs, according to a Hechinger Report investigation that included interviews with more than 35 former students and employees, as well as a review of university records.

Students were sold on the hopes of finding a lucrative job—reviewing security alerts, responding to breaches, testing company systems—at a time of economic uncertainty and rapidly rising costs. In the end, though, they reported the company often gave improbable, deceptive, or false information about job prospects and oversold its own support services.

Still, more than 20 universities, including prestigious public institutions, partnered with IronCircle, offering a de facto seal of approval. The universities earned money—millions of dollars, in some cases—off the arrangement. But IronCircle remained free to operate without following many of the federal rules and regulations designed to protect students.

“When you’re signing up for education offered by an established, reputable university, you’re typically not trying to enroll in a for-profit boot camp dressed up in wrapping paper,” said Aaron Ament, president of the legal advocacy group Student Defense. “Schools that are putting their name on the program have an obligation to oversee it.”

IronCircle officials did not respond to a dozen requests for comment made via email, LinkedIn direct message, and phone in the weeks leading up to the liquidation. QuickStart, the online boot camp provider that announced its acquisition of IronCircle in February, said via email the closure happened outside its control because it had only “acquired certain assets” from IronCircle’s former owner, and said it would let some students transfer into QuickStart courses.

The University of Central Florida did not respond to questions from the Hechinger Report about the abrupt announcement that IronCircle was shutting down. But school officials told Collins in an email that they had been “blindsided” and were working to gather student information to communicate future updates. Other university partners also said they had been caught unaware.

But IronCircle programs had operated with minimal oversight for years. At least one school never collected any program completion or job placement data from IronCircle, according to public record request responses. Others did, and continued the partnership despite incomplete or dismal numbers or despite student complaints.

IronCircle existed in a gray space in the higher education landscape, one populated with several cyber, data science, and coding boot camps that purport to offer people a path into an industry that can be impossible to break into without training. Although it offered programs through accredited universities, it was not accredited itself. Outside officials did not monitor the company’s finances. Its enrollment, completion, and earnings data were not publicly available. And students who needed help paying for the program had to take on private loans, often at much higher interest rates than federal ones and without protections against sudden closures.

The federal government has been slow to regulate these types of companies that partner with accredited universities. In the waning days of the Biden administration, the Department of Education introduced guidance instructing any third-party university partners not to misrepresent themselves as being part of a college and requiring that they follow the same regulations as universities themselves, including when it came to “providing false, misleading or inaccurate information” about “the employability of its graduates.” Department spokesperson Ellen Keast said the guidance remains in effect under the Trump administration, but some experts question how closely anyone is overseeing such companies.

“The Education Department is absolutely not paying attention to this right now,” said Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, investigations manager with the higher education program at New America, a liberal policy group. “It was a struggle to get the Biden administration to do much about it.”

When an admissions representative from HackerUSA, an earlier IronCircle name, phoned Marni Vilardi in May 2021 about a 10-month virtual cybersecurity boot camp run through the University of Michigan, it sounded perfect. (The boot camp would undergo a first name change a few months later, becoming ThriveDX, before changing once more to IronCircle in 2025.)

When the pandemic struck, Vilardi had lost her bartending job. She was serving as a primary caregiver for her ailing mother, while looking for work.

She recalls the company representative telling her that she could expect to make a salary of up to $95,000 right after finishing the program. “Just think,” she remembers the representative saying, “you’re going to be able to hire a private nurse for your mom.” She signed up.

So did Shane Mack. Recruiters with ThriveDX, another earlier name of the company, persuaded him that he could soon make six figures, he said, promoting the program so convincingly that he quit his job as a precision machinist and cashed out his 401(k) plan to cover expenses while enrolled in the University at Buffalo’s program. His ThriveDX classmate RoniKa Griggs recalled being told by a recruiter that 90 percent of the company’s students found jobs, including some before they finished the course. On signing up through the University of Central Florida in 2025, David Young said, he was promised direct connections to people in the cybersecurity field to help find work.

None of it came to pass.

There was good reason for the students to view cybersecurity as a smart career path. The industry was growing, and companies paid well for the positions in an effort to stay a step ahead of hackers.

But the market for cybersecurity workers was becoming flooded. Today, supply for entry-level workers in the industry far outstrips demand. Beginning jobs often require previous work in information technology, often in lower-paying positions, experts say—experience many of IronCircle’s students did not have.

“Entry-level cybersecurity is almost an oxymoron,” said Ira Winkler, a cybersecurity professional and adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “Everyone says, ‘There’s a shortage, we should train people.’ There’s a shortage for experienced people who know very specific skill sets.”

IronCircle did not tell prospective students this, according to former students and employees. Instead, they said, under pressure to complete a certain number of monthly sales, many representatives painted a rosy picture of job prospects.

“They want to make the student feel like they’re getting everything on a platter,” said one former IronCircle employee who worked as a learner success manager and career coach. (She was granted anonymity to protect her professional reputation. ) “I just think there was a lot of predatory behavior going on trying to make the sale.”

Many universities contacted for this article did not directly answer questions about allegations made by IronCircle students. The University at Buffalo did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The University of Michigan said it had stopped its partnership with IronCircle due to decreasing interest in the program, while a University of Central Florida spokesperson pointed out that students sign an agreement upon enrolling acknowledging that career services are optional and that the boot camp, in the spokesperson’s words, “does not guarantee job placement upon completion.”

It wasn’t only the recruiters’ assurances that prompted students to sign up for IronCircle’s program. It mattered that respected universities put their names on it.

One of those students was Bret Morris, who took classes with an IronCircle predecessor through the University of Central Florida. He assumed the program had been thoroughly reviewed and was carefully monitored. When he first expressed interest in the classes, “I thought I was actually contacting UCF,” said Morris. “I thought UCF was part of the program.”

IronCircle played up its university connections. Advertisements were emblazoned with university logos and colors. Admissions representatives stressed the partnerships in phone calls, according to former students and employees. Some instructors used university backgrounds images while teaching their courses.

Participating colleges were responsible for signing off on coursework and instructors, according to contracts obtained through a public records request, but IronCircle handled marketing and curriculum development, hired the teachers, and taught all the classes.

Universities each received a percentage of tuition revenue. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for instance, earned about $1.8 million through its IronCircle partnership in the 2023–24 school year, records show. From March 2024 to March 2025, IronCircle owed the University of Central Florida nearly $1.2 million, according to a past-due agreement with the school.

“It’s almost like renting out a brand,” said Eileen Connor, president and director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a legal group. “It’s really creating consumer confusion. If you didn’t have these university partnerships, I don’t think as many people would be ensnared in this scam.”

Raymond Osorno, a disabled military veteran, enrolled through San Diego State University, assuming the university would only offer a high-caliber program. But he grew skeptical that the course, which he described as “a mile wide and an inch deep,” would help him find a job.

“The school is nothing like it says,” he said. “It’s like having a sticker saying, ‘I did a cyber course.’ ”

He reached out to IronCircle with a litany of questions, including asking them for job placement statistics for the program. The response he received: “We do not track this data.”

San Diego State responded to a records request by the Hechinger Report by saying it did not have responsive documents. A university spokesperson did not answer questions about student outcomes but said that, for all partnerships, the school “sets expectations that programs deliver high-quality instruction, transparent communication to prospective students, and meaningful career development resources.”

In response to records requests, two universities provided reports from IronCircle that contained some job placement data but not enough information to calculate an overall rate. Three universities had complete records. At those, only 35 percent of program graduates were recorded as finding employment within six months.

IronCircle only considered people as having “opted in” to its career services once they had completed a specific set of tasks, public records show. About 55 percent of its students at the three universities met those criteria, and of those, less than two-thirds reported finding a job, according to the data provided by the company.

At the University of Central Florida, IronCircle started tracking the job placement rate of nearly all program finishers beginning in November 2024. Of 325 students, only 26 were recorded as finding a job within six months of completing the program.

When Morris enrolled though UCF, he’d been a stay-at-home dad for 15 years, but recruiters had assured him he would still easily find a job. Career services would work with him one-on-one to help craft a résumé, he recalls being told.

Instead, he said, he was given a generic template. When he raised the issue, he said, his learning success manager suggested he get a job at Best Buy for more work experience.

All of the program completers interviewed for this article reported significant shortcomings with IronCircle’s academic support and career services. They said they had difficulty getting anyone to respond to their questions, and the career guidance they did receive was often unhelpful, mostly involving formatting résumés and LinkedIn profiles.

The former student success adviser and career coach interviewed for this article said she had a caseload of almost 700 students at one point. “It was always a fight for getting on my calendar,” she said.

Kat Kuhlman, who completed IronCircle’s course this February through the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said she thought she’d find a position through what she called the company’s “exclusive job board.” She discovered it simply aggregated postings from other sources, including Indeed. Many were in information technology, not cybersecurity, or advertised far less money than admissions representatives had told her to expect. One was for a food safety and quality assurance technician and paid a maximum annual salary of $41,600.

Kuhlman ended up working at Jersey Mike’s Subs after finishing her program. “I needed a job,” she said, “because $18,000 for a year of schooling didn’t get me a job.”

UNLV spokesperson Francis McCabe said in an email that hundreds of students had participated in the boot camp through the school since 2021. “There were students who achieved their academic and workforce goals through the program, and unfortunately some who did not,” he wrote. “UNLV has been committed to working with any student who has concerns with the program.”

On June 9, as it did every month, a tuition payment of more than $1,200 hit Rick Stauffacher’s credit card. He was 10 months—and more than $13,600—into his IronCircle boot camp offered through the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Two days later, he received an email telling him that the program was shut down. (In response to questions, Madison spokesperson Greg Bump said only that the university was
“winding down its partnership.”)

Stauffacher and other students began scrambling, trying to figure out if they could get their money back. But the options were limited.

Students will be at the bottom of the list to recoup money from liquidation proceedings, experts say. The main private loan lender, Sallie Mae, has no obligation to forgive loans. Students can push universities for a refund, but a sampling of enrollment agreements reviewed by Hechinger say that each agreement is between the student and the company, making the university’s role unclear.

Based on the terms of its acquisition of IronCircle’s assets, QuickStart said, it is not liable financially.

Stauffacher has received regular messages from his payment management company saying his account is delinquent. When he called the company, he said, he was told he would continue to be charged, even though he does not plan to transfer to a QuickStart program. His credit card company initially rejected his application for a refund, he said, but he eventually got $8,000 back.

Stauffacher never heard from UW–Madison, although he noted that the program had been taken off the university’s website. He regrets trusting the school to vet IronCircle’s offerings.

At the time, he said, he thought, “They’re not going to put their name on something they think is terrible.”

But, he added, “I guess they didn’t care, because they were making a bunch of money off of it and not having to do any work besides putting it on their website.”