For years, Dr. Aljanal Carroll was too ashamed to look at her degree from Walden University, let alone put it on display.

Even after months slogging through reams of graduate work that earned her a doctorate in business administration in 2020, which she sought in hopes of a promotion inside a company dominated by white men, the process left her feeling robbed of a sense of accomplishment.

Dr. Carroll was promised that the program would take 18 months. Instead, it took three years and about $15,000 in additional tuition, after the school repeatedly delayed the approval of her capstone project — akin to a doctoral dissertation — with her advisers dragging out their reviews for weeks and coming back with small grammatical revisions that would start the clock again.

Only after the university settled a class-action lawsuit this year that was brought by students with a similar experience did Dr. Carroll, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, decide to take her degree out of the corner of her office.

“Now I really feel like this degree means something to me,” Dr. Carroll said.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Maryland approved a final settlement against Walden of $28.5 million in damages for as many as 2,300 former and current students. It came as a breakthrough after a previous class action against Walden was dismissed in 2017.

The complaint, filed in 2022, claimed that Walden employed “enrollment advisers” to give false information to prospective students, estimating that they could finish a doctoral program in business in three and a half years, and at a cost of $43,000 to $60,000.

Mr. Butler’s work, beginning with street gangs in Oakland, Calif., and extending to a last-chance high school in that city for students who had been expelled from other schools, first gained attention through articles in 2013 in The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor and a 2017 documentary film, “Circles.”

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