A Christian university in Arizona is accusing the Biden administration of "unjustly" targeting the school with investigations and is questioning whether religion was the motivation.
In a statement released Thursday, Grand Canyon University in Phoenix blasted the Department of Education, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Veterans Affairs for what it said were unjust investigations prompted by the college's tax status.
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The dispute dates back to 2018 when the university, then a for-profit school, switched to nonprofit status amid record enrollment that has seen the school grow to among the largest private Christian universities in the country.
The switch, which was made with the IRS, has not been recognized by the Department of Education, which continues to classify the school as a for-profit entity, and included the school on a list of colleges eligible for student loan forgiveness under legal settlement. That settlement was for a case brought by students who attended for-profit colleges and had alleged they had been defrauded when taking out student loans.
Grand Canyon University has since sued the department, seeking to be recognized as a nonprofit institution. Without nonprofit status, the school will continue to miss out on a wide swath of benefits, including increased federal funds, that are typically reserved for nonprofit institutions.
The Biden administration has made oversight of for-profit institutions a major focus, decrying such schools as malignant actors that benefit from federal funds but leave graduates saddled in debt and without substantially improved career prospects. The Department of Education recently finalized a regulation called the "Gainful Employment" rule that tightens oversight of such schools.
Grand Canyon University President Brian Mueller told the Washington Examiner in an interview that the school has faced a flurry of investigations from three agencies in the years since it switched its IRS status. The investigations have centered on complaints typically made against for-profit institutions, namely that the school has misrepresented itself to students and has not sufficiently provided graduates with a return on their investment.
"They started these investigations that were basically fishing expeditions," Mueller said. "They weren't accusing us of anything specifically, but they were requesting thousands and thousands and thousands of files, documents, etc., and they looked for what they thought they could find."
Mueller said that the agencies initially identified two things that they said were in violation of the law.
The first was the VA accusing the school of false advertising for claiming that cybersecurity jobs were in high demand in the current economy while promoting the university's cybersecurity degree program.
"Those are true and accurate statements," Mueller said. "And so we responded to them, and they backed down."
The second centered on a doctoral program. The Department of Education said that the university was misrepresenting the cost of the program on its website, a fact that the university disagreed with and said there had been no student complaints in that regard. To that end, Mueller said that two weeks ago, the school was notified that the department intends to levy a fine against the institution.
"All the things that typically trigger the department to look into a university that uses Title IV funds was not true about us," Mueller said. "We [have] had a difficult time understanding why these investigations are taking place."
Mueller speculated that the government agencies have launched the investigations into Grand Canyon in part because they see the Christian university as more conservative, but he said there was no way to know the administration's true motivation.
"We're well supported locally in our state by both Republicans and Democrats, and so people say, 'Why are they doing this? Is it ideological? Is it political? Is it religious?' The answer is we don't know," Mueller said, noting that all the things that could typically trigger an investigation — student complaints, high default rates, high debt amounts, inferior facilities, inferior faculty, lack of jobs for graduates — did not apply to the university.
"We have stellar marks in all those areas," he added. "There's just no reasonable explanation for why this is happening."
Mueller said he is only left assuming that the agencies are not dealing with the school "in good faith" and that the institution has only been granted one 45-minute meeting with federal officials over the last five years.
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"There is no corroborating evidence that somehow we need to be investigated because we're a bad player in higher education," he said. "And so it feels that there is some ideological thing that's driving this because we can't explain it any other way."
The Washington Examiner contacted the Department of Education and the Federal Trade Commission for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of Veterans Affairs declined to comment, citing "ongoing litigation."