This Summer Betsy DeVos Quietly Repealed the “Gainful Employment Rule” on For-Profit Colleges and Trade Schools
This summer, while we’ve been reading about candidates running for President in 2020, the tragedy of mass shootings, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, deregulation has been perking along at the U.S. Department of Education, even though Betsy DeVos has managed to stay out of the spotlight. Right at the end of June, DeVos and her staff moved along their agenda to deregulate for-profit colleges and trade schools by eliminating an important Obama-era rule. On Friday, June 28, they repealed what has been known as the “gainful employment rule.”
The Associated Press’s Collin Binkley reports: “The agency’s announcement said the rule focused too narrowly on graduate earnings and unfairly targeted for-profit colleges.”
What was the “gainful employment rule”? Concerned that the federal government was bankrolling—with student grants and loans—shoddy career training programs that left graduates deeply in debt and unqualified to get a job, the Obama Department of Education created a rule to deny federal financial aid to these institutions unless they proved their programs were well enough designed to provide their students the skills that would make them employable upon graduation.
The NY Times’ Erica Green explains: “The so-called gainful employment rule was issued by the Obama administration in 2014 right before huge for-profit chains collapsed, leaving students stranded with debt and worthless degrees. Under the new standards, career and certificate programs, many of which operate in the for-profit sector, would have to prove their graduates could find gainful employment to maintain access to federal financial aid. It also would have required schools to disclose in advertisements a comparison of the student debt load of their graduates and their career earnings.”
The Washington Post‘s Danielle Douglas-Gabriel reports that the rule has motivated the for-profit higher education sector to clean up its act: “Shortly after the rule took effect, many CONTINUE READING: This Summer Betsy DeVos Quietly Repealed the “Gainful Employment Rule” on For-Profit Colleges and Trade Schools | janresseger
