if you're referring specifically to CU here with your fears of pinyin, my guess is that they're well founded. i mean, not necessarily the fear itself but your association of that method with CU. I took their first-semester, full-time Canto class and it was all romanization based, with no characters. which i actually think was a good approach but if it's not what you want to do than you wouldn't have liked that class.
I don't know for sure that they use the same approach for mandarin but that would be my guess.