The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now the second federal agency to target Grand Canyon University (GCU) the largest Christian university in the country.
In a press release published on Wednesday, the FTC announced that it filed a lawsuit against GCU, its marketing arm Grand Canyon, and the Christian university’s president Brian Mueller for engaging in what the agency calls “deceptive advertising” and illegal telemarketing.
Samuel Levine, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said that the GCU deceived students by “holding itself out as a non-profit institution and misrepresenting the costs and number of courses required to earn doctoral degrees.” GCU refuted this claim in October, stating that the institution “goes beyond” federal “requirements by providing cost estimates for each year of the program of study and for all of its degree programs, including those at the doctoral level.” Nevertheless, Levine added that the federal agency will continue to “aggressively pursue those who seek to take advantage of students.”
The federal agency argued that GCU misled prospective students by marketing itself as a nonprofit organization, however, the university firmly rebutted that there is nothing erroneous in doing so in a statement released by the school several months ago after it was first targeted by the Department of Education (DoE) over the institution’s nonprofit status.
“GCU was a nonprofit institution from its inception in 1949 until 2004, when it partnered with private investors in order to avoid closing and gain access to capital to grow the university,” the university explained in an October statement. “The university returned to its historic 501(c)(3) tax-exempt Arizona nonprofit status in 2018, which has been recognized by the IRS, Higher Learning Commission, State of Arizona, Arizona Private Postsecondary Board and NCAA Athletics.” The school then said that the DoE has “refused to acknowledge GCU’s nonprofit status for purposes of federal student financial aid,” leading to a bout of legal exchanges from both parties.
The university further accused federal agencies of conducting a broad “fishing expedition” by requesting “voluminous amounts of information and records.”
In addition to allegations hurled at the Christian university from the DoE and FTC, the Arizona Veterans Services State Approving Agency (AZ SAA), which falls under the federal Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) also issued findings this year claiming “two innocuous statements in GCU’s advertising – ‘Cybersecurity experts are in high demand’ and ‘Every company needs cybersecurity’ – were somehow ‘erroneous, deceptive or misleading.'”
“[No] other traditional university that has received this level of scrutiny,” the school’s press release added.
A separate statement published by the university included a timeline of legal disputes between the school and the federal government, dating back to July 2018, when GCU converted legally to a nonprofit institution, and proceeding through 2022 and to the present day.
The university said that the federal agencies’ legal attacks were “[coordinated] efforts with frivolous accusations in order to bring harm to [the] largest Christian university in the country.”
