By Tate Miller
A new report highlights the U.S. Department of Education’s disparity towards both Christian and career colleges through an “obscure agency” created by former President Barack Obama and revived under President Joe Biden: the Office of Enforcement.
The American Principles Project’s (APP) report revealed that “nearly 70 percent of penalties imposed by the Office of Enforcement have been against Christian institutions and career colleges, even though these schools represent less than 10 percent of college students.”
When reached for comment, the Department of Education (ED) did not respond.
The APP is a pro-family group that fights to defend families politically in campaigns and elections, according to its website. Its report was authored by the organization’s policy director, Jon Schweppe.
The report states that ED’s Office of Enforcement is the department’s “vehicle to target and penalize proprietary schools.”
According to the report, the Office of Enforcement’s three main tactics in its strategy for “dismantling its targets” are imposing penalties, “scrutinize and fine” investigations, and cutting off Title IV funding.
Schweppe told The Center Square that in order to stop this weaponization against Christian and career schools, “Trump’s [ED] can deprioritize the Office of Enforcement and temporarily halt existing enforcement proceedings while it investigates the depth of the Biden [ED’s] unlawful discrimination.”
“We need to learn exactly what led to these disparities in enforcement – and who was responsible,” Schweppe said.
“The long-term goal should be to put rules in place to prevent this type of discrimination against Christian schools from ever happening again,” Scweppe said.
When asked what the purpose of ED should be, Schweppe told TCS that “most conservatives will tell you that the Department of Education shouldn’t exist.”
“While we support any effort in Congress to shutter the Department, we believe Trump’s USED in the meantime should properly enforce federal civil rights law, undo the Obama/Biden eras bureaucratic overreaches, and ultimately return as much power as possible to states and local school districts,” Schweppe said.
Schweppe said that Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education is “exactly the type of change agent we need to make American education great again.”
As examples of the disparity shown toward Christian schools via penalties and fines, the APP report stated that “within the last year the Biden-Harris Department of Education imposed record fines against two of the nation’s most prominent Christian universities – Grand Canyon University ($37.7 million) and Liberty University ($14 million).”
“These fines total more than all other penalties assessed by the Department of Education over the past seven years,” according to the report, and the reasoning behind them was not substantial.
GCU’s public relations executive director Bob Romantic told The Center Square that the school “look[s] forward to an administration that, rather than using federal agencies to harass universities to which they are ideologically opposed, will reduce bureaucracy while applying regulations fairly and equitably.”
When reached for comment, Liberty did not respond.
ED’s attacks on career schools are nothing new. In 2015 and 2016 respectively, Corinthian Colleges, “once the largest career-education institution in the country,” and the ITT Technical Institute were forced to close after being “fined and prevented from receiving financial aid.”
More recently, ED “has cut off Title IV funding to 35 post-secondary schools” over the past three years, 23 of which were career colleges.
The report additionally cited examples of Title IV funding being withheld from Christian colleges and universities.
“Using its scrutinize-and-sue tactics, the Department of Education can penalize and withhold federal aid to non-traditional schools,” the report stated. “When they go under, the administration can cancel students’ loan debt, making good on its campaign promise. And, of course, students then have fewer higher education options, cornering the market for conventional universities.”
The Office of Enforcement was “deprioritized” under Trump until being “restored” under Biden in 2021, according to the APP report.
In 2023, Biden “increased the Office of Enforcement’s budget by nearly 600 percent,” the report stated.
