Trump admin drops $37.7M fine against Christian school that lied about tuition
Grand Canyon University misled students about the costs of its doctoral programs. Now it's off the hook.
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The Trump administration is letting a Christian school get away with lying to students about tuition costs.
The lies from Grand Canyon University were so egregious that the previous administration, in 2023, fined the school a record $37.7 million. But because this administration acts like “anti-Christian bias” is a real phenomenon, the school is now off the hook.
In case you need a refresher, GCU is based in Phoenix, Arizona and enrolls over 100,000 students, mostly online. The previous Department of Education said that the school lowballed its tuition fees to reel in students seeking their doctorates… before hitting them with larger fees once they were already taking classes.
[A Federal Student Aid] investigation found GCU lied to more than 7,500 former and current students about the cost of its doctoral programs over several years. GCU falsely advertised a lower cost than what 98% of students ended up paying to complete certain doctoral programs.
“GCU lied about the cost of its doctoral programs to attract students to enroll,” said FSA Chief Operating Officer Richard Cordray. “FSA takes its oversight responsibilities seriously. GCU’s lies harmed students, broke their trust, and led to unexpectedly high levels of student debt. Today, we are holding GCU accountable for its actions, protecting students and taxpayers, and upholding the integrity of the federal student aid programs.”
Grand Canyon University advertised its doctoral programs as costing anywhere from $40,000 - $49,000. That was meant to cover a variety of programs that required students to complete 60 credit hours and write a dissertation. In reality, however, fewer than 2% of students paid that amount because they had to take more classes to complete their degrees. Most students (78%) ended up paying nearly 25% above that sticker price in order to take necessary “continuation courses,” amounting to an additional $10,000-$12,000 per student, between 2017 and 2022.
Furthermore, the Department of Education explained, the fictional tuition cost was stated on GCU’s website, it’s enrollment agreement, the “Net Price Calculator,” and other marketing materials. This wasn’t some accident on one part of their website; it was clearly a calculated move to attract students before later gouging them.
Just consider this one example: If you were interested in getting your Ph.D. in Psychology—or, more technically, your “Doctor of Philosophy in General Psychology: Cognition and Instruction (Qualitative Research)”—this is what the school’s website would show you at the time:
That says it would take 60 credit hours at a cost of $725 per credit. If you do the math, that comes out to $43,500. What isn’t clear from that page is that just about all students need to take additional courses to get that degree. Even if you knew that, the cost of those extra credits wasn’t available anywhere on the site.
Even more damning? The DoE wrote that “internal emails indicate that GCU leadership has been aware since at least January 2017 that its disclosures regarding cost were incomplete or misleading.”
GCU officials insisted they weren’t lying at all and that the additional fees were mentioned to students via “fine print disclosures” and other documents, but the government said that wasn’t an acceptable excuse. In addition to the $37,735,000 fine, the government also demanded that GCU stop lying about the cost of a doctoral degree and “engage a monitor” to make sure the school was complying with the law.
The reason the government was allowed to levy this fine at all is because GCU, despite being a private Christian school, receives over $1.1 billion in Title IV funding (i.e. federal financial aid). The Department of Education had every right, then, to make sure those funds were being used as intended. The report said that more than $18 million in federal funds had been given to 1,344 students enrolled in GCU doctoral programs in the past year alone. 7,547 students had gone through GCU’s doctoral programs since 2018, resulting in over $122 million paid in tuition.
The DoE was actually going easy on the school. According to its own letter, they could have instituted a fine of over $509 million, roughly $67,500 for each of 7,547 violations found. But the $37.7 million fine brought that down to a mere $5,000 per violation, reflecting on the fact “that the violations identified did not impact all of GCU’s programs and students, but rather were confined to doctoral programs requiring a dissertation.”
The school insisted it did nothing wrong, dismissing the allegations as a series of “lies and deceptive statements.” Officials also acted like this was anti-Christian persecution.
GCU “categorically denies every accusation in the Department of Education’s statement,” a press release explained, adding that this fine was “further evidence of the coordinated and unjust actions the federal government is taking against the largest Christian university in the country.”
But there was nothing anti-Christian taking place. The letter documenting the alleged violations made no mention of the school’s faith-based foundations because those were irrelevant. The only concern was the discrepancy between stated costs and real ones.
Since that time, the school has appealed the fine while insisting they did nothing wrong. They even celebrated a state-run agency that completed an audit and found no reason to stop working with the school. (That audit didn’t specifically go into the claims made by the Education Dept.) Still, GCU’s president Brian Mueller responded by repeating his claims of persecution and arguing that “there are no student complaints” about their fees. (Ironically, two students later filed a class action lawsuit against the school, saying they were victims of GCU’s price gouging. That lawsuit is still ongoing. The school says, not surprisingly, it’s without merit.)
It’s almost funny how simple the solution to all this would have been. All GCU had to do was include the cost of the continuation courses in their estimates for prospective students. Don’t hide it in fine print or exclude it from within a chart. Don’t act like Ticketmaster with hidden fees. Just disclose it all up front, let students know what other students getting the same degree pay, on average, and stop trying to lowball the amount because it makes you look good by comparison. If 98% of doctoral students are paying a higher-than-listed price for their degree, then the estimated price is clearly a lie.
But GCU didn’t want to do that. They wanted to lie and they felt like hiding behind a shield of Christianity would protect them from scrutiny.
Looks like they were right about that.
On Friday night, GCU announced that the Department of Education, now run by wrestling magnate Linda McMahon, had rescinded the penalty against them.
In a Joint Stipulation of Dismissal order issued by ED’s Office of Hearings and Appeals, the Department dismissed the case with no findings, fines, liabilities or penalties of any kind. ED confirmed it has not established that GCU violated any Title IV requirements, including the claim that GCU “substantially misrepresented” the cost of its doctoral programs that was alleged by ED officials under the Biden Administration. The Dismissal stated unequivocally that “there are no findings against GCU, or any of its employees, officers, agents, or contractors, and no fine is imposed.”
To be clear, while that legally clears the school, that doesn’t necessarily mean they did nothing wrong. It just means the Republican government is choosing to look the other way. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Trump administration doesn’t give a shit about schools that screw students out of money. Just because no punishments will be levied by the Education Department doesn’t undo the basic math of how much the courses cost (compared to how much the school said they cost).
The school is spinning this to pretend it never did anything wrong:
GCU President Brian Mueller said the fine dismissal is welcome news but he was not surprised by the decision. “The facts clearly support our contention that we were wrongly accused of misleading our Doctoral students and we appreciate the recognition that those accusations were without merit,” Mueller said. “GCU is a leader in innovation, transparency and best practices in higher education and we look forward to working cooperatively with the Department in the future – just as we have with all regulatory agencies.”
Just because they won’t pay a fine under a Republican-led government doesn’t mean they were “wrongly accused” by a Democratic-led one. All that means is that conservative Christians are considered above the law under this administration.
I’m not saying that out of nowhere. When the administration’s ridiculous task force to address “anti-Christian bias” in the government met for the first time last month, the penalty against Grand Canyon University was one of the subjects that was discussed… even though, as I mentioned earlier, the fines had absolutely nothing to do with the school’s religious mission.
The Department of Education hasn’t released any information about this story, as far as I can tell. Not publicly. Not yet. Everyone’s just working off of GCU’s press release.
But it should be noted that earlier this month, a federal judge allowed that class action lawsuit to proceed even though GCU tried to dismiss it. That’s not a ruling on the merits—not yet—but just because the Republican government can look the other way doesn’t mean GCU is out of the woods, on the exact same issue, in a federal court.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
So the takeaway here is that Christian’s can break the law and any penalty is anti-christian bias. This is indeed the worst timeline.
I thought about getting an advanced teaching degree there once upon a time, but pulled back when I realized it’s religious affiliation.