[6][7] In 1979, Patriot University was established at the Dallas, Texas home of school founder Lonnie Skinner.

[11] In 1993, its address was listed as 6915 Palmer Park Blvd in Colorado Springs, with Wayne Knight as President and Director.

[16] In July 2004, the school changed its name to Patriot Bible University and moved out of College Heights Baptist Church and into a building in Del Norte, Colorado, a small town of 1,700 people.

According to property records, Hilltop Baptist Church bought the Patriot building, which was valued at $232,495; it currently[when?]

"[18] Also in 2006, it said it had about 400 active, distance learning based students, and issued approximately 50 to 100 Christian religious degrees (Bachelor's, Master's and Doctorates) per year.

[19] In November 2011, PBU's President and Hilltop Baptist pastor Wayne Knight was arrested on four counts alleging that he knew about his niece molesting a child at Hilltop Baptist School, but "failed to comply with a state law requiring them to report it to law enforcement".

[14][20] According to court affidavits, Knight "displayed a consistent pattern to manipulate and control the situation—not only among the faculty at Hilltop Baptist School—but also among parent [sic?

[21] In February 2012, Knight took a plea deal where he "pleaded guilty to being an accessory to a crime and failure to report suspected child abuse," and planned to move to Texas.

[27] Critics have charged that Patriot Bible University is a diploma mill as it has unreasonably low graduation requirements, lack of sufficient faculty or educational standards, and a suspicious tuition scheme, among other issues.

[8][35] Hovind's use of the title Doctor in particular has provoked interest and subsequently, scrutiny of his education credentials as well as his dissertation.

[36] The lack of quality was ascribed, in part, to the fact that "the pages are not numbered; there is no title; of sixteen or so chapters in the index only the first four are finished; misspellings are rampant (immerged for emerged, epic for epoch, and tentable for testable are three examples); and the single illustration was apparently cut out of a science book with scissors and fastened to the thesis with glue or tape.

[37] In Patriot's school catalog, Hovind is quoted as saying "It was the study for my dissertation that opened so many doors of opportunity for me to preach.