Report: Biden administration ‘weaponized’ Education Department to target Christian, career schools

Conservatives have another suggestion for President-elect Donald Trump’s to-do list: End the Department of Education’s targeting of religious and for-profit colleges and universities.

The American Principles Project issued a scathing report Monday urging the incoming administration to eliminate the department’s Office of Enforcement, saying it has levied nearly 70% of its enforcement actions against faith-based and career schools, even though they serve fewer than 10% of post-secondary students.

“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,” said Jon Schweppe, APP policy director. “The unfair targeting of these institutions has been egregious, and it needs to stop immediately.”

Mr. Trump isn’t likely to disagree.

In his first term, the Republican neutered the Office of Enforcement, which was created under the Obama administration in 2016 and then reinvigorated in 2021 by President Biden.

“During his first term, President Donald Trump deprioritized the Enforcement Office, and his next administration should eliminate it,” Mr. Schweppe said. “APP looks forward to working with the Trump-Vance administration and Republican leaders to end the Democrats’ years-long campaign to control and eliminate faith-based universities once and for all.”

Providing plenty of ammo is the organization’s report, “The Obscure Agency Leading a Crusade Against Christian Colleges and How New Data Proves the Bias.”

The report found that 59 out of 87 actions taken by the Office of Enforcement involved faith-based or career-education schools, citing data released by the department in August.

“At least 12 Christian colleges and universities have been the target of excessive penalties from the Office of Enforcement or banned from receiving federal student aid,” the analysis said. “By comparison, no Ivy League school has been the recipient of punitive action by the Office of Enforcement.”

BREAKING: APP Report Shows Biden-Harris Admin Weaponized Education Office to Target Christian and Career Colleges.

Drawing on newly obtained data, the report found that nearly 70 percent of the Department’s enforcement actions have involved faith-based and career schools,… pic.twitter.com/MfZ3rGy9bX

— American Principles 🇺🇸 (@approject) November 18, 2024

Since 2021, the office has levied $51.2 million in fines against religious schools versus $38.3 million against all other universities, a disparity of 57.2% to 42.8%.

Topping the list is Grand Canyon University, the nation’s largest Christian university, which was hit with a $37.7 million fine in October 2023 for “not fully informing” doctoral students about the cost of their degree.

Grand Canyon has staunchly denied the accusation and refused to pay the fine.

Grand Canyon won a legal victory last week when a court said that the department applied the wrong legal standard in rejecting the university’s request to be recognized as a non-profit for federal student aid.

Founded as a nonprofit in 1949, Grand Canyon switched to a for-profit model in 2004, but its 2018 decision to return to its nonprofit roots has met with resistance from the department.

The administration’s defenders have praised the office for going after bad actors, citing concerns about fraud, deceptive marketing, and selling “poor quality educations at sky-high prices,” said David Halperin, editor of Republic Review and a leading critic of for-profit colleges.

Many of the department’s fines involve paperwork errors stemming from federal requirements under the Clery Act, which requires reporting of campus crime statistics, but the largest such penalty by far was levied in March against Liberty University.

The Christian college, founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, was hit with a $14.4 million fine for record-keeping violations after a probe of records going back seven years, which Liberty described as “by far, the most extensive review period of any higher education institution in the Department’s history of published reviews.”

The violations included “lack of administrative capacity”; incomplete and inaccurate accounting; failing to establish a system to collect adequately crime data; and failing to publish an annual security report. Liberty agreed to spend $2 million to improve its system.

The APP report described the fine as disproportionate.

“By comparison, Michigan State University was fined $4.5 million in 2019 for failing to report sexual abuses by former team doctor Larry Nassar, who assaulted hundreds of victims,” the report said. “In 2016, Penn State University was fined $2.4 million for failing to report 11 ‘serious findings of noncompliance’ related to the school’s handling of Jerry Sandusky’s sexual misconduct.”

Those two fines were “at the time the largest penalties imposed by the Department of Education for violations of the Clery Act.”

The report said that the average Clery Act penalty for Christian schools committing Clery Act violations was $815,000 versus $228,571 for public and other private institutions.

The APP also urged Congress to take action, including oversight hearings of the enforcement office and “subpoenas for those Biden Administration officials who engaged in these unlawful actions.”