A group of former George Brown College students has won a landmark $2.75 million in damages from the college for misleading advertising about a course that failed to deliver the career credentials it advertised.

The settlement was part of a class-action suit by 108 former students of the International Business Program who complained the course did not deliver three industry qualifications that students felt had been promised in the course description.

In releasing the settlement statement this week — eight years after the lawsuit was launched — Ontario Superior Court Justice Edward Belobaba called the compensation “generous and fair.”

Belobaba found the college guilty in 2012 of “negligent misrepresentation” and a breach of the Consumer Protection Act for suggesting the eight-month program would qualify students for three special industry designations — international trade, custom services and international freight forwarding. The credentials usually take two years to earn and can lead to lucrative jobs.

However the college had no partnerships with the industry groups that administer those designations, which had been the attraction for many students, two-thirds of whom had come from around the world.

“It’s taken eight years, but we’re just happy this weight has been lifted off our shoulders and someone finally listened to us,” said Katrina Ramdath, who had quit a bank job to take the George Brown course specifically for the designation in international trade.

The settlement will give each international student in the class action up to $22,484 to cover tuition, textbooks, airfare, immigration fees, public transportation and living expenses while they were here, and a portion of the income they lost by going to school. Canadian students will receive up to $16,427 each, and the three students who led the class action, including Ramdath, each receive a $10,000 honorarium for their time.

George Brown never intended to mislead students by suggesting the credentials would follow automatically from taking the course, said Mark Nesbitt, vice-president of corporate services, “but the language was misleading and has been fixed. It was a wake-up call for us to be careful in writing consumer marketing promises.

“It underlines the importance of bringing a more critical set of eyes to our communications.”

Sources said the settlement is the first in Ontario in which claimants did not have to argue for their own individual damages amounts by showing receipts, etc., but rather had damages calculated on an “aggregate basis” based on figures provided by an expert report presented by the students’ lawyer.

Ramdath called the settlement “bittersweet; it finally happened after eight years, so there’s a sigh of relief, but I still don’t have that designation (international trade) I had wanted and thought I was going to get through the course.”