For-profit schools had until Friday to tell their students if they were at risk of losing losing federal funding due to high student debt levels, but the deadline has been pushed back.
The Education Department is delaying enforcement of a rule requiring for-profit and career colleges to warn prospective students that the school is at risk of losing federal funding due to high student debt levels.
The Obama-era rule set this Friday as the deadline for schools to make the disclosures, but that has now been pushed back. The delay, announced late Monday, is the first indication that the Trump administration may roll back regulation of for-profit colleges, with the Education Department slowing the implementation of a signature piece of the Barack Obama’s higher education policy.
Under the “gainful employment” regulations, introduced by the Obama administration, for-profit colleges whose students take on high amounts of debt while earning too little would lose access to federal financial aid money, a virtual death sentence for most schools. The Education Department said in a release Monday that it had delayed enforcement of the disclosure rule “to further review the [gainful employment] regulations and their implementation.” The department did not respond to a request for further comment.
In the latest data released by the Obama administration in January, 800 colleges, which graduated more than 115,000 students in a two-year period, failed the metrics. By Friday, those schools would have had to notify prospective students that they were in danger of losing access to federal funding. They now have until July 1 to post those warnings.