The Federal Trade Commission voted last Friday to dismiss a lawsuit against an affiliate of Grand Canyon University and one executive after deciding pursuing the case further was a waste of time and money.
GCU celebrated the decision with a press release that repeatedly claimed the Biden administration’s investigations into the school’s nonprofit status and the cost of its graduate programs represented “coordinated lawfare” against “the largest Christian university in the country.”
“GCU has maintained that the allegations were a coordinated effort by former officials within the Biden administration to undermine a thriving Christian university,” said GCU’s press release.
GCU says it has an enrollment of 123,000, with 25,000 students on campus. Liberty University claims an enrollment of more than 140,000 students, which would make Liberty the country’s largest Christian school.
The Biden administration investigated GCU over two issues: Questions about the school’s nonprofit status and claims the school knowingly lied to grad students about how much their degrees would cost.
GCU’s status has changed over the years. It began as a nonprofit Baptist-affiliated school in 1949, changed its status to for-profit in 2004, then changed its status back to nonprofit in 2018. GCU entered into a partnership with a for-profit company called Grand Canyon Education that provides services to GCU. The IRS questioned these arrangements.
The Department of Education also investigated GCU and fined the school $37.7 million after concluding the school knowingly lied to graduate students about how much their degrees would cost.
The DOE said 78% of grad students were required to pay more than $10,000 above advertised amounts to complete their degrees. These additional fees often were paid by U.S. taxpayers since GCU has been the biggest recipient of federal student aid four years running.
But after the inaugural meeting of the Trump administration’s new Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias in May, the IRS announced it was halting its investigations and the DOE announced it was canceling the fine.
GCU claimed vindication, but the Freedom from Religion Foundation condemned the decision, saying it “reeks of religious favoritism and political interference.”
The FTC’s vote on Friday to dismiss the remaining lawsuit ends the Biden era’s actions concerning GCU.
“This was not about protecting students and went well beyond normal regulatory activity,” said GCU President Brian Mueller. “The language used by these officials, the record fines they sought and the baseless accusations they made all point to a broader ideological agenda.”
Mueller claimed the investigation into GCU’s costs for grad students was not conducted in good faith but was instead conducted “under the guise of ‘consumer protection.’”
“They threw everything they had at us for four years and yet, despite every unjust accusation leveled against us, we have not only survived but have continued to thrive as a university,” Mueller said. “We support common sense government oversight but we vehemently reject ideologically driven, weaponized government actions that are not applied equally and equitably to all institutions.”
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