Because internet courses are cheap to deliver at scale, the online division is a big revenue driver for Liberty, which brought in $591 million in tuition in 2013, against $470 million in expenses. Liberty is essentially a medium-size nonprofit college that owns a huge for-profit college.

The giant for-profit University of Phoenix enrolls more online students (over 100,000) than any other college. The second-largest online enrollment is at Liberty. Financially, the main difference between the two is that Liberty doesn’t pay taxes. Liberty’s marketing and recruitment are driven by an 800-person telemarketing call center in a former Sears department store near the main campus.

Most of the tuition for Liberty’s online students comes from financial aid provided by the federal Department of Education, the same body that Mr. Falwell says is engaged in “overreaching regulation.”

In 2015, Liberty received $347 million from federal undergraduate grant and loan programs. Few other private nonprofit colleges receive anything like that sum. To put the amount in perspective, the highly regarded University of Virginia, a nearby state university, received $37 million from the same sources that year. Arizona State, the nation’s largest public university, received $169 million. Liberty’s considerable financial success — it has built a $1 billion cash reserve, and Mr. Falwell is paid more than $900,000 a year — was underwritten largely by the federal taxpayer.

Unfortunately, many Liberty students are struggling to repay their federal loans. Around 9 percent default within three years of graduating, ruining their credit ratings and creating financial burdens nearly impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. Among all private nonprofit four-year colleges, the average default rate is 6.5 percent.

Most Liberty students avoid default, but many are making no progress in reducing their loan balances. Only 38 percent of Liberty borrowers manage to pay down as little as one dollar on their student loan principal within three years of leaving school. This is probably because many struggle to land well-paying jobs. Forty-one percent of former Liberty students earn less than $25,000 per year — the typical salary for people with only a high school diploma at age 25 — six years after entering college.

The Obama administration’s borrower protections require for-profit colleges with loan repayment rates below 50 percent to prominently note this fact, like lung cancer warnings on the side of a cigarette package, in promotional materials. The label must read, verbatim, “U.S. Department of Education Warning: A majority of recent student loan borrowers at this school are not paying down their loans.”