Over the holidays, a shuttered chain of predatory career colleges operated by billionaire GOP donor Carl Barney continued its seemingly endless second life as a habitual courthouse litigant.

On December 24, the Colorado Court of Appeals affirmed a $3 million penalty against one of Barney’s schools, CollegeAmerica, upholding a 2020 decision by a Colorado district judge, after a full trial, that the school’s deceptive practices violated the Colorado Consumer Protection Act. Barney’s operation, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education, had appealed that decision to the Colorado appellate court and then the Colorado Supreme Court, which sent the case back to the trial court for further proceedings. On its second review, the appellate court rejected Barney’s latest appeal and upheld the trial court’s February 2025 finding that CollegeAmerica’s deceptions had a significant impact on the public.

Then on December 30, the United States Tax Court disallowed in part a $132,428,708 charitable tax deduction that Barney claimed when he sold the schools in 2012 to CEHE, a non-profit organization that he controlled. The Internal Revenue Service had denied the entire charitable deduction and issued to Barney a Notice of Deficiency, determining a tax deficiency of more than $31 million and imposing accuracy-related penalties of more than $12 million. But the U.S. Tax Court handed Barney a partial victory, allowing a new computation of the deduction and a potential cancellation of the penalty.

Carl Barney donated more than a million dollars to political committees working to elect Donald Trump in 2024. Yet last April the U.S. Justice Department took Barney’s schools to trial in a long-running fraud case. But Barney won that round after a Utah federal judge eliminated most of the claims against Barney’s schools from the case and a Utah jury then ruled in favor of the schools.

Barney’s operation included the CollegeAmerica, Stevens-Henager, and Independence University brands. In 2012, he sold the operation to CEHE, a non-profit organization he had recently taken over, in a troubling deal. Barney loaned CEHE $431 million to finance the sale, based on a puzzling $419 million valuation of the schools’ “intangible assets,” such as its reputation. CEHE was then obligated to repay its debt to Barney, along with millions in rent he charged for the schools to use his buildings. The schools ultimately took in more than a billion in taxpayer dollars, and much of that money went straight into Barney’s wallet. 

The troubling record of Carl Barney’s colleges, and endless litigation

Like Donald Trump, who in 2016 paid $25 million to settle civil charges by New York’s attorney general that his unaccredited real estate school, Trump University, defrauded its students, Carl Barney saw his schools shut down after law enforcement agencies and former students went to court over claims of deceptive practices.

The CEHE schools, which operated both on campus and online, repeatedly engaged in deceptive and predatory recruiting and lending for its high-priced and often poor-quality programs. 

In August 2020, following an extensive trial, the Colorado trial court sided with that state’s attorney general and found CEHE, CollegeAmerica, Barney, and CEHE CEO Eric Juhlin liable for deceptive practices and awarded the $3 million judgment. The Colorado court found that Barney’s schools used a detailed playbook to manipulate vulnerable students into enrolling in high-priced, low-quality programs; that the schools directed admissions representatives to “enroll every student,” regardless of whether the student would likely graduate; that the schools’ recruiters and advertisements greatly overstated starting salaries that graduates could earn; and that the schools falsely inflated graduation rates.

In April 2021, Independence University’s accreditor, ACCSC, ended its approval of the school, which by then was CEHE’s main school, effectively repealing its eligibility for federal student grants and loans. Soon after, the U.S. Department of Education restricted the flow of such aid. In the wake of those developments, CEHE shut down classes and laid off most staff.

Although its schools were shuttered, CEHE still faced additional legal challenges. In addition to the Justice Department’s False Claims lawsuit,  the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau pursued a separate investigation into CEHE’s private loan practices. The new Trump administration gutted the CFPB, killing that probe.

CEHE, despite the probes, bad publicity, and collapse of its schools, has continued trying to collect the high-interest private loan debt it created for its broke former students.

CEHE has portrayed itself as a victim of a political conspiracy against it, with ongoing vitriol on Twitter from former CEO Eric Juhlin, whom the Department of Education took the rare step of suspending from federal contracting. More attacks on CEHE critics, and the Colorado attorney general office and court, have come from Barney.

Barney has charged on his grievance-heavy blog that the case brought by the Colorado AG against his schools is a “horror story of government corruption,” and “a multi-agency collusion to put schools out of business” — a supposed plot that involved not only a senior assistant Colorado attorney general, but also the executive director of accreditor ACCSC, officials of the U.S. Department of Eduction, and “the cabal of progressive haters of private colleges (David Halperin, Robert Shireman, entities funded by Arnold Ventures, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Sen. Richard Durbin).”

In December 2022, CEHE took its grievance campaign to a new low by suing the United States government for $500 million in the U.S. Court of Claims, asserting, as a press release statement by Juhlin contended, that the Department of Education “in coordination with ideological confederates… has been on a campaign to cripple and close as many private career colleges as possible” and that CEHE’s schools were “a victim of this campaign.”

During President Biden’s last week in office, the Department of Education granted $1.15 billion in automatic debt cancellation to 73,600 borrowers who attended CEHE schools between 2006 and the school chain’s collapse in 2021. The Department said in a statement that its decision was “based on findings that CEHE engaged in widespread and pervasive misrepresentations related to salaries, employment prospects, and its private loan product.” 

In addition to using its taxpayer-provided dollars to spend big on lawyers, and burden America’s courts with its endless appeals and claims, Barney’s operation appears to have cultivated friendships at the right-wing Heritage Foundation and various other donation-hungry Washington, DC, “think tank” operations, which have repeatedly published misleading articles defending Barney’s schools and attacking their critics. These Carl Barney superfans, such as Heritage’s Adam Kissel, have proposed, as an antidote to the supposed persecution of Barney’s schools, a higher education agenda that matches pretty closely with what Trump Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is now serving up.