Highly inflated fraud in some cases.
On the flip side, no one forces anyone to have a degree in lesbian basket weaving.
There were people in school who would have never been able to get a degree in a decent career field like engineering or medical. They thought journalism and teaching was hard; they complained to me about how hard they had to study. If they had to spend one weekend night studying to get work done and could not go out, that was a hard work week.
Legal? Sure. Ethical? Maybe not so much. It certainly sold itself as a magic bullet to desperate people looking for a degree, for a price. Does that make it any different from the hundreds of other "safety schools" offering Fill-in-the-Blank Studies Degrees for the price of four years of tuition? Nope, and its diploma was about as valuable.