Mr. Dottore said the charges were reasonable and appropriate, even if his submissions contained a few errors he blamed on a new software system that his firm was still learning to use.

“We had 30 days to figure out what to do with 17,000 students,” said Mr. Dottore, who is billing at his standard rate — $400 an hour for him and up to $300 for his employees. “In my line of business, nobody is ever happy with me. We’re only put into situations that are dire.”

The dispute over Mr. Dottore’s bills is the latest fracas in the messy unwinding of Dream Center Education Holdings, a religious nonprofit that had no higher education experience when it took over the battered remains of Education Management Corporation in late 2017. Barely a year later, Dream Center also ran out of cash.

But filing for bankruptcy immediately ends a school’s eligibility for federal financial aid funds, which is a death knell for most schools. Hoping to buy some time for restructuring, Dream Center’s officials enlisted a cooperative creditor, a small marketing firm whose invoices had not been paid, to sue in January in federal court in Cleveland. The firm asked that Mr. Dottore — who had been working with Dream Center since October as a paid consultant — be named receiver. Dream Center quickly told the court that it agreed, and within a day, Judge Dan Aaron Polster approved the request.

Mr. Dottore told students that his goal was to keep their schools open at least through the end of the semester. But the Education Department cut off Dream Center’s eligibility for federal student loans in late February because Dream Center officials had withheld and misused students’ stipends — loan money the students were supposed to receive for living expenses. In early March, Mr. Dottore then shut down nearly all the schools under his control.