A report revealed that nearly 70% of enforcement actions carried out by the Biden administration’s Department of Education targeted faith-based and career schools. According to a press release from the American Principles Project (APP), newly obtained data indicated that almost 70 percent of the Department of Education’s (ED) enforcement actions were focused on faith-based and career schools, despite these institutions serving less than 10 percent of students in the U.S. APP Policy Director Jon Schweppe said the Democrats have been “busy weaponizing every part of the federal government to target their opponents” for the past four years.
“While major assaults from agencies like the Department of Justice have taken most of the headlines, we should not ignore similarly corrupt efforts in other agencies as well,” Schweppe said, as reported by Fox News. “As our report details, the Biden-Harris Department of Education has been engaged in a long-running scheme to punish Christian colleges that are ideologically opposed to the left’s agenda. The unfair targeting of these institutions has been egregious, and it needs to stop immediately.”
The APP highlights that two of the nation’s leading Christian universities, Grand Canyon University (GCU) and Liberty University, have been scrutinized by the Department of Education (ED). Both institutions faced record-level fines, exceeding “all penalties imposed over the past seven years combined,” including fines against Penn State ($2.4 million) and Michigan State ($4.5 million) related to the sexual crimes committed by Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar.
GCU is currently appealing a $37.7 million fine imposed by the ED in November of last year, stemming from allegations that the Arizona-based university misled students about the cost of its doctoral programs over several years, Fox News reported. Additionally, Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona vowed in April to shut down GCU during a House Appropriations Committee hearing on for-profit colleges. The Biden administration official argued that “predatory schools” are “preying on first-generation students.”
The report from APP said further that at “least 12 Christian colleges have been the target of excessive penalties or banned from receiving federal student aid; by comparison, no Ivy League school has been the recipient of punitive action by the Office of Enforcement. The average fine against a Christian school for a Clery Act violation was $815,000, compared to $228,571 against public and private institutions.”
The report follows a recent legal victory for Grand Canyon University (GCU) over the Department of Education (ED) concerning its nonprofit status. The ED had denied GCU’s nonprofit recognition, despite the approval of the university by the Arizona Board for Private Postsecondary Education, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the State of Arizona, and the Higher Learning Commission. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the ED had unlawfully applied an incorrect standard to assess the university’s nonprofit status.