Students Paid Thousands for a Caltech Boot Camp. Caltech Didn’t Teach It.

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 program, and the school’s orange logo appeared on the promised certificates of completion. Mr. Sewer, 46, who works in Denver and enrolled in the $9,000 program to try to leave the mortgage industry. But after Mr. Sewer signed up, he said that Caltech was almost nowhere to be found. Mr. 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 Mr. 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 program to a company called Simplilearn.