The president of Liberty University acknowledged the importance of accreditation, academics and athletics of his father, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, for setting the remarkable foundation for the extraordinary growth of the evangelical Christian university.
The school is located in the foothills of the Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and is considered the largest evangelical Christian university in the world. Liberty University has more than 100,000 registered students with most of them being distance learners. Jerry Falwell claims that this makes Liberty the largest university in Virginia, which initially started off as a little Baptist college initiated by his father in Lynchburg in 1971.
The growth of the institution grabs President Falwell by surprise as well. The net assets of the university have grown from $100 million in 2000 to over $1.4 billion by now. Its tuition is in the lowest of 25% of all the private schools in the country. The default rate of the student loan is half of the national average. The institution now has witnessed nearly a 1,000% increase in applications from 2003 to 2013.
As if that was not enough, the debate team of the university has claimed several national titles and has been a giant slayer that has beaten teams from Harvard and Vanderbilt.
Even though Falwell is a conservative Christian like his father, he says he says he has got enough to handle running Liberty without being a culture warrior like his father had been.