Globe University — A 131-Year-Old School Killed by a Fraudulent Degree

Summary

Globe University was a Minnesota-based for-profit college network, founded in 1885 as Globe College and rebranded "Globe University" in 2007, that collapsed in 2016 after a state court found it had defrauded its own students. Together with its sister institution, the Minnesota School of Business — founded in 1877, one of the oldest business schools in the state — it operated under the Myhre family's ownership across roughly two dozen campuses in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and South Dakota, peaking near 10,000 students around 2009. For a for-profit chain, it had an unusually long and locally respectable history. That history did not save it.

The institution's undoing was a single program. Globe and the Minnesota School of Business marketed a criminal-justice degree to students who wanted to become police officers, probation officers, and parole agents — careers with specific statutory licensure and training requirements in Minnesota. The schools' degree did not meet those requirements and could not lead to those jobs. Students paid between roughly $40,000 and $80,000, between 2009 and 2015, for a credential the court found provided "no value" toward the careers they had been recruited to pursue. In 2014 the Minnesota Attorney General sued. In September 2016, a Hennepin County District Court judge ruled that the schools had committed consumer fraud and deceptive trade practices.

The fraud finding was the lever that turned off the money. Under federal law, a school judicially determined to have committed fraud can be cut off from Title IV student aid, and the U.S. Department of Education notified the schools that, effective December 31, 2016, none of their locations would remain eligible for federal financial aid. For an institution that, like every chain in this file, lived on federal money, that was the end. The Minnesota operations were ordered to stop, and by 2017 all Globe and Minnesota School of Business campuses in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and South Dakota had closed.

What distinguishes Globe is that the killing blow came not from an accreditor or a missed financial-responsibility test but from a courtroom, where a judge examined a single product the school sold and found it fraudulent. The case became a landmark for state enforcement against for-profit deception, and it eventually delivered defrauded students tens of millions of dollars in debt forgiveness and restitution — relief built on a fraud finding rather than a regulator's discretion.

Timeline

A Practical School That Lasted a Century

Globe University did not begin as a modern for-profit chain, and that is part of what makes its ending notable. Globe College was founded in 1885 by Frank A. Maron, a German-educated immigrant who saw demand for practical, vocational education — bookkeeping, business skills, the trades of clerical and commercial life — among young Minnesotans who were not bound for a traditional university. Its sister institution, the Minnesota School of Business, was older still, founded in 1877 and among the oldest business schools in the state. For generations these were ordinary, locally rooted career schools, the kind of unglamorous institution that quietly trains a community's office workers and tradespeople.

The transformation into a modern for-profit network came with ownership. Terry Myhre bought the Minnesota School of Business in 1988, and over the following decades he and his family assembled the two brands into the Globe Education Network, expanding across Minnesota and into Wisconsin and South Dakota and rebranding Globe College as Globe University in 2007. By the time it peaked around 2009, the network enrolled roughly 10,000 students across some two dozen campuses, offering associate's, bachelor's, and master's programs in business, health sciences, information technology, veterinary technology, and criminal justice. The long history lent the brand a credibility that newer chains lacked — these were not fly-by-night storefronts but institutions with names older than the state's modern university system.

Underneath the heritage, though, the business ran on the same fuel as every other for-profit chain: federal Title IV student aid, drawn by recruiting students into programs financed largely by federal grants and loans. The longevity was real, but it did not change the economics, and it did not change the incentive that would eventually surface in court — the pressure to enroll students in programs whose marketing outran their value.

The Degree That Led Nowhere

The fraud was specific and, once examined, plain. Globe University and the Minnesota School of Business offered a criminal-justice degree, and they marketed it to people who wanted to work in law enforcement — to become police officers, sheriff's deputies, probation and parole agents. That is a regulated field. Minnesota, like most states, sets statutory requirements for who may be licensed as a peace officer and what training that requires, and a degree that does not satisfy those requirements is, for the aspiring officer, useless. The schools' criminal-justice program did not meet Minnesota's requirements. Graduates could not become the officers the recruiting had promised they would become.

The cost of that gap fell on the students. Between 2009 and 2015 they paid roughly $40,000 to $80,000 for the program — substantial debt, taken on by people who had been told, by a school with a 130-year-old name, that it was the path to a law-enforcement career. The court that examined the matter did not mince the conclusion: the degree provided "no value" toward the careers the schools had marketed. The students had bought a credential for a purpose the credential could not serve, and the school knew, or should have known, the requirements of the field it was selling entry into.

There had been warnings from inside. In 2011, a former dean, Heidi Weber, won a whistleblower suit against the network — a verdict the Minnesota Supreme Court later upheld — in what was described as the first whistleblower trial of a for-profit institution of higher education. The internal signals were there years before the state acted. The criminal-justice deception was the particular harm that the Attorney General would ultimately take to trial, but it sat within a pattern of high-pressure recruiting that the litigation laid out: the for-profit imperative to enroll, applied to a program whose promise the school could not keep.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For the students enrolled when the campuses closed in 2016 and 2017, the immediate disruption was the familiar one — programs cut off, the scramble to transfer credits that might or might not be honored elsewhere, and debt that did not disappear with the school. But Globe's aftermath diverged from the bleaker for-profit endings in one important way: because the closure rested on a judicial fraud finding, the students had a strong legal foundation for relief, and that relief eventually came. Over the following years, the Minnesota Attorney General's office — under Lori Swanson and then her successor Keith Ellison — secured substantial redress for the defrauded criminal-justice students, ultimately amounting to tens of millions of dollars in combined federal debt forgiveness and restitution for fraud and illegal lending. The schools' owners filed for bankruptcy in 2019 amid the damages they owed.

The case left a mark larger than the chain itself. It stood as a landmark demonstration that a state attorney general could take a for-profit college to trial over a specific deceptive program and win a fraud finding, and that such a finding could both cut off the school's federal lifeline and unlock loan discharges for the people it had misled. The criminal-justice degree that led nowhere became a textbook example of the gap between for-profit marketing and the licensure realities of the careers being sold — a warning to regulators to scrutinize programs that promise entry into licensed professions. The 131-year-old institution is gone, its campuses across three states closed and sold. What survives is a precedent: that the most effective check on a for-profit's deceptive program may be a courtroom, and that a fraud finding, slow as it is to obtain, can give stranded students something a sudden closure rarely does — a documented basis to be made whole.

Lessons

References

• Judge orders Globe University and Minnesota School of Business to stop fraudulent marketing WSAW / AP
• MSB and Globe University (press release on the fraud case and student relief) Minnesota Attorney General
• Attorney General Ellison's office notches big victory for defrauded MSB/Globe students Minnesota Attorney General
• Relief on the way for defrauded students at MN School of Business, Globe U Star Tribune
• Globe University and Minnesota School of Business Wikipedia (founding and corporate history)