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THE CENTER SQUARE—A new report highlights a disparity in the Department of Education toward both Christian and career colleges through its Office of Enforcement, an “obscure agency” created during the Obama administration and revived under President Joe Biden.

The American Principles Project’s report reveals that “nearly 70% of penalties imposed by the Office of Enforcement have been against Christian institutions and career colleges, even though these schools represent less than 10% of college students.”

When reached for comment, the Department of Education didn’t respond.

The American Principles Project 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 the Office of Enforcement is the Education Department’s “vehicle to target and penalize proprietary schools.”

According to the report, the Office of Enforcement’s three main tactics for “dismantling its targets” are to impose penalties, “scrutinize and fine” investigations, and cut off Title IV funding.

APP’s Schweppe told The Center Square that to stop this weaponization against Christian and career schools, Trump’s Education Department “can deprioritize the Office of Enforcement and temporarily halt existing enforcement proceedings while it investigates the depth of the Biden [Education Department’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,” he said.

When asked what the Education Department’s purpose should be, Schweppe said 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 [Education Department] 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,” he said.

Schweppe said that Trump’s nominee to head the Education Department, former Small Business Administration chief Linda McMahon, 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 American Principles Project’s report says 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,” the report says, and the reasoning behind them was not substantial.

Grand Canyon University’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 University didn’t respond.

The Education Department’s attacks on career schools are nothing new. In 2015 and 2016, respectively, both 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,” according to the report.

More recently, the Education Department “has cut off Title IV funding to 35 post-secondary schools” over the past three years, 23 of them career colleges.

The report also cites 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 states. “When they go under, the [Biden] 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 Education Department’s Office of Enforcement was “deprioritized” under Trump until being “restored” under Biden in 2021, the APP report says.

In 2023, Biden “increased the Office of Enforcement’s budget by nearly 600%,” it says.

Originally published by The Center Square