Earlier this month, Congressman Andy Biggs (R-AZ5) introduced the Guarding Religious And Career Education (GRACE) Act. If enacted, it would direct Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to outright eliminate the DOE’s Office of Enforcement within the Office of Federal Student Aid. The office, according to a report from the American Principles Project (APP), overwhelmingly enforced actions against faith-based and career-centered schools.
According to the APP report, the vast majority of all enforcement actions, at almost 70%, were directed toward institutions of these varieties despite their accounting for less than ten percent of the total number of enrolled students in the nation.
In a press release from Rep. Biggs, the congressman cited the example of the egregious targeting of Grand Canyon University (GCU), the largest Christian university in America and the extremely questionable $37.7 million fine levied against the school as previously reported by AZ Free News.
NEW: I introduced the Guarding Religious and Career Education (GRACE) Act to combat the weaponization of the Department of Education that occurred under Joe Biden’s regime.
In a letter to McMahon, Biggs urged the newly minted Secretary to launch an investigation into the Office of Enforcement’s targeting of Christian and technical schools amidst the mass reductions in workforce already underway.
He wrote in part, “It is imperative to determine the extent of any ideological targeting and to hold those responsible accountable for their actions. For example, in October 2023, ED’s Office of Enforcement fined Grand Canyon University, (GCU) $37.7 million for allegedly misrepresenting the cost of doctoral programs, an allegation GCU has categorically denied and is appealing. The claim has been refuted judicially and administratively: in federal court, by the Higher Learning Commission in its 2021 comprehensive review, and by the Arizona State Approving Agency of the Department of Veterans Affairs in an audit.”
McMahon told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that her termination of over half the Department’s staff is in fact part of a “total shutdown” of the agency. “Yes — actually, it is,” she said, adding, “That was the president’s mandate. His directive to me clearly is to shut down the Department of Education.”
In line with the actions McMahon is already taking, Biggs called upon her to shudder the Office of Enforcement altogether in the GRACE Act, writing, “The continued existence of the office appears to serve as a vehicle for weaponization rather than a tool for oversight. The targeting of Christian universities and career colleges must end.”
The federal government unlawfully denied Grand Canyon University (GCU) its nonprofit status, per a new federal court ruling.
Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Grand Canyon University v. Miguel Cardona that the U.S. Department of Education (ED) was wrong to refuse the Christian university their nonprofit status.
Circuit Judge Daniel Collins reversed the summary judgment by District Court Judge Susan Bolton favoring ED. Collins remanded GCU’s nonprofit status back to ED for review.
ED had determined that GCU’s organizing documents satisfied the IRS organizational test’s requirements; however, ED denied GCU when it came to the operational test. ED determined that GCU’s primary activities and its stream of revenue both didn’t benefit the university. Collins disagreed.
Collins ruled that ED had invoked the wrong legal standards, going beyond the Higher Education Act (HEA) requirements to impose exceeding IRS regulations. Rather, Collins ruled that HEA standards only require ED to determine whether GCU was owned and operated by a nonprofit corporation and whether GCU satisfied the no-inurement requirement.
“The Department invoked the wrong legal standards by relying on IRS regulations that impose requirements that go well beyond the HEA’s requirements and instead implement a portion of § 501(c)(3) that has no counterpart in the definition of the term ‘nonprofit’ set forth in HEA § 103(13),” ruled Collins.
The inurement requirement allows nonprofits to buy from for-profit companies at fair market value.
GCU has been battling with ED over its nonprofit status since 2019, when ED denied the IRS status granted to GCU. GCU had historically been a nonprofit school, save a stint in the early 2000s when the university went for-profit to avoid bankruptcy.
After GCU sued ED in 2021 over the denial, ED launched a coordinated investigation with the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Veterans Affairs for unfair or deceptive practices.
Last year, ED levied a $38 million fine against GCU.
GCU maintained that ED targeted them over their ideological differences, since they are a Christian university.
Bob Romantic, GCU executive director of the office of communications and public relations, said in a press release that the nonprofit status would allow GCU to thrive more than it has been able to under a for-profit status.
“While the university remains exceedingly proud of what it achieved during its short stint as a for-profit institution, building up GCU from the brink of bankruptcy into the largest Christian university in the country, nonprofit status best allows the university to accomplish its goals around research, grant writing, development, being full members of the NCAA, etc.,” said Romantic. “Today’s decision is a long-awaited correction to the Department’s unlawful application of a standard that improperly denied GCU of its nonprofit status, and we are hopeful for a quick affirmation of the university as a nonprofit institution.”
President-elect Donald Trump pledged to dismantle ED “very early” in his administration in a campaign video last year, citing America’s high spending and poor student outcomes compared to other nations.
“[We’re] sending all education and education work and needs back to the states. We want them to run the education of our children, because they’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse,” said Trump. “We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, D.C., we’re going to close it up, all those buildings all over the place, and yeah people that, in many cases, hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the states.”
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
Almost 30,000 students will graduate from Grand Canyon University later this month, marking the third time the school has produced this many alumni in a year.
“We are blessed to be able to celebrate the accomplishments of another record class of graduates who are meeting the needs of today’s workforce and fulfilling their purpose as servant leaders throughout the world,” GCU President Brian Mueller said in a statement.
On April 25-26, GCU will hold commencement ceremonies for 5,388 traditional students on the Phoenix campus, while the 23,597 graduating online students will have commencement May 1-3. The total number of students in the graduating class is 28,985, including those who completed their degrees in Summer 2023, Fall 2023, and projected graduates from Spring 2024.
In the 2022-23 year, 29,116 students graduated, while 30,000 graduated in the 2021-22 year.
“While enrollment numbers and graduation numbers are declining nationwide, we have continued to produce a significant number of graduates who are impacting industries throughout the country,” Mueller said.
Of all graduates, 15,580 completed their undergraduate degree, and 13,405 were graduate students earning master’s or doctoral degrees.
The Honors College had 682 graduates, raising the total to more than 2,500 since the college started in 2013.
In the 2023-24 academic year, enrollment at GCU surpassed 25,000 on the Phoenix campus, with another more than 92,000 studying online. Additionally, GCU grew from nine to 10 colleges when the College of Science, Engineering and Technology split into two, forming the College of Engineering and Technology and the College of Natural Sciences.
GCU also opened a physical location for its Grand Canyon Theological Seminary in the fall. The 17,000-square-foot Seminary offers GCU’s Master of Divinity program and provides a meeting space for local pastors.
The Phoenix-based university also created the Center for Workforce Development and added two more Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing program sites, bringing the total number of sites to six. GCU is on track to open three more sites in the 2024-25 academic year.
Mueller attributed the growth to students, faculty, and above all, God.
“That is a testament to the extraordinary power of education when delivered creatively across multiple platforms and taught from a Christian worldview perspective,” Mueller said. “It is also a reflection of both our outstanding students and the support they receive from our faculty and staff.”
Elizabeth Troutman is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send her news tips using this link.
The largest Christian university in the U.S., Grand Canyon University (GCU), defended itself against “disturbing and defamatory” public comments made by the U.S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
“Mr. Cardona’s inflammatory comments, which are legally and factually incorrect, are so reckless that GCU has no choice but to demand an immediate retraction,” the statement says. “He is either confused, misinformed or does not understand the actions taken by his own agency.”
At the House Appropriations Committee hearing last week, Cardona said “we are cracking down not only to shut them down, but to send a message to not prey on students.”
The Goldwater Institute filed a lawsuit on behalf of GCU in February due to the Biden administration imposing a $37 million fine on the school. The conservative think tank claims the administration has refused to provide documents that explain why it fined GCU.
“GCU has been asked repeatedly why it believes it is being targeted by federal agencies of the Biden Administration,” the school’s statement reads. “Here’s what we can tell you: Mr. Cardona’s inflammatory comments make very clear the Department of Education’s intentions and their disdain for institutions that do not fit their ideological agenda. What’s also clear is that ED has no lawful grounds to carry out those intentions based on their disingenuous and factually unsupportable allegations.”
The Education Department’s conduct extends normal regulatory activity, the statement says.
“It epitomizes the weaponization of federal agencies’ power against a private Christian university,” according to the statement.
GCU is confident an impartial court of law would exonerate it from the allegations.
“GCU’s intent is to fight these accusations all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary,” the statement says. “The Department of Education’s intent, based on the frivolous nature of its accusations and defamatory statements from ED officials, seems to be to damage the university’s reputation, use its ‘findings’ as a rationale to seek loan forgiveness for students under the borrower’s defense to repayment program and impose unprecedented fines and legal fees. In other words, regardless of the inevitable legal outcomes in GCU’s favor, the process becomes the punishment.”
GCU has more than 118,000 students. The Phoenix university says it will continue to thrive.
“With 118,000 students and growing, GCU is thriving and will continue to thrive. In an industry that is struggling and slow to change, GCU has created a model that has allowed it to freeze tuition on its ground campus for 16 straight years, increase diversity and social mobility by ensuring that higher education is affordable to all socioeconomic classes (over 40% of GCU’s ground campus student body are students of color), maintain lower student loan default rates than the national average and lower student debt levels than other private universities, and produce nearly 30,000 graduates in each of the past three years.”
The statement continued, “If a government-run institution produced those kinds of outcomes, it would be applauded. At the largest private Christian university in the country, it draws unwarranted threats from the Secretary of Education and the ire of the federal government.”
Elizabeth Troutman is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send her news tips using this link.
Arizona’s auditing agency for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) found no wrongdoing in its recent audit of Grand Canyon University (GCU).
The Arizona State Approving Agency (SAA) undertook the audit in response to the ongoing Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit against GCU for allegedly deceptive advertising and illegal telemarketing. The FTC sued GCU in December, several months after the Department of Education (ED) fined the university over $37 million for allegedly deceiving doctoral students into paying more for their degrees than advertised.
In the SAA letter to GCU reviewed by AZ Free News, SAA said that its audit yielded no evidence supporting the Biden administration’s claims.
“The Arizona SAA did not have any substantiated findings based on our review of Grand Canyon University,” stated SAA’s letter to GCU. “There are no findings impacting the continued approval of Grand Canyon University at this time. There are no follow-up actions required by Grand Canyon University at this time.”
SAA announced its audit in January, the second one to take place in under a year; the last SAA audit occurred last May.
GCU President Brian Mueller told AZ Free News that the SAA’s findings were in agreement with two favorable court rulings in recent years, all of which found GCU to not be guilty of the issues that the Biden administration claims exist. Mueller said that these discrepancies were “troubling,” and further indication of an unjust and purposeful targeting.
“The SAA, our accrediting body and two federal judges all looked at the same set of facts as the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. and came to the complete opposite conclusion,” said Mueller. “To have zero findings, praise and a court ruling that our disclosures are clear on one end and then have the U.S. Department of Education impose its largest fine ever on the other… that is very troubling. To be targeted in this manner by the federal government is an egregious example of overreach and the weaponization of these federal agencies.”
The Higher Learning Commission, GCU’s accrediting body, assessed the university’s doctoral disclosures to be “robust and thorough,” providing a “clear” academic and financial pathway for prospective students.
The Biden administration appears to be alone in its unfavorable assessment of GCU; further records to provide context as to why have not been made available for public review, either.
The lack of transparency prompted the Goldwater Institute to sue the Biden administration last month. ED denied their public records request seeking the documents that informed ED’s decision to fine GCU. The records request was spurred by the fact that ED didn’t include student complaints or visitations to GCU as part of their investigation into the university.
In our report issued several days before ED announced its record fine into the university, the Biden administration apparently coordinated efforts between ED, FTC, and VA to investigate GCU after the university sued ED for denying its nonprofit status. The IRS granted nonprofit status to GCU in 2018, but it took until late 2019 for ED to deny the status.
SAA recognized GCU as a private nonprofit in its most recent audit report.
Several months after GCU sued ED in early 2021, the agency launched a multi-year, off-site review of GCU. Several months after ED’s announcement, the FTC announced that it found GCU in violation of federal law; each violation incurs civil penalties of up to $50,000. The last time the FTC exercised the authority it leveled against GCU was in 1978.
The FTC, ED, and VA began their investigations into GCU in 2022.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
