Grand Canyon University may have seen its budding Cinderella run in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament cut short by the University of Alabama on Sunday, but the Arizona Christian university is facing far greater odds as it tries to stand up to political persecution from the Biden administration.
GCU won its first March Madness tournament game on Friday when it defeated St. Mary’s 75-66 in an upset before falling to Alabama on Sunday night 72-61 in the second round of the tournament. It was a valiant effort for a school that is relatively new to the NCAA athletics scene, but it also brought attention to the school’s legal battles with the Biden administration.
In October, the Biden administration’s Department of Education announced it was fining GCU $37.7 million, claiming the school “lied to more than 7,500 former and current students about the cost of its doctoral programs over several years.” According to the department, “GCU falsely advertised a lower cost than what 98% of students ended up paying to complete certain doctoral programs.”
The fine came after several other investigations by the Biden administration into the school failed to yield sufficient evidence of any wrongdoing. The school still maintains it did nothing wrong and is appealing the fine.
There are two reasons for the Department of Education’s fixation on GCU: First, it is the largest Christian university in the nation and leans toward more conservative Christianity. Second, it was a for-profit college for a while, and the Biden administration has made for-profit colleges a major focus of fraud enforcement.
But GCU moved away from for-profit status several years ago. It is currently recognized as a nonprofit school by the IRS, the state of Arizona, and its accreditor. The only entities that do not recognize its change to for-profit status are the Department of Education and the Federal Trade Commission, both of which have launched investigations of wrongdoing into the university.
For a school allegedly hellbent on defrauding its students, GCU is doing a very poor job. Its annual tuition is $16,500 before institutional scholarships are added, and it has not changed since 2008. And this is all while nearly all institutions have continued to raise tuition rates.
In 2015, seven years after GCU implemented its tuition freeze, tuition at Harvard University was $40,418; today it is $54,269. Baylor University, a Christian college like Grand Canyon, charged $26,966 for tuition in the 2010-2011 school year but has hiked it to $58,100 for the 2024-2025 school year.
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And that’s just two examples. The vast majority of institutions have hiked their tuition rates to outrageous levels, ensuring that attending college is a ticket to crippling debt that in some cases will take decades to pay off.
But the Biden administration and the Department of Education are not investigating the leftist enclaves in higher education that have saddled an entire generation with more than a trillion dollars of student loan debt. They’re only going after the most successful Christian university in the nation because the rules that apply to GCU cannot possibly be applied to the Ivy League or other prestige institutions. If those schools were found to be defrauding students it would destroy their reputations and the status they confer on their far-left graduates. And that cannot be tolerated.