The Department of Education is listening to the industry more than they are students, critics say
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced a change to an Obama-era rule Thursday that borrower advocates say will put students at risk of being preyed on by schools that are supposed to prepare students for careers.
If the Department of Education decides career-training programs don’t adequately prepare their students for employment, those programs can now dispute the agency’s findings with their own data with no baseline requirements as to the size of the sample — as long as DeVos deems them to be reliable metrics. The announcement is the latest step taken by the Trump administration that slows implementation of the gainful employment rule, which aims to measure whether job training programs are delivering on promises to prepare students adequately for a career.
“We really needed this rule to be able to say, ‘At least there’s something ensuring our taxpayer dollars are being spent at programs that actually help students,’” said Jennifer Wang, the director of the D.C. office for the Institute of College Access and Success, a nonprofit that promotes college access. “We can’t be wasting taxpayer dollars on overpriced ineffective programs that don’t prepare students for employment if that’s the purpose of the program,” Wang added.
Under the rule, developed by the Obama administration, career-training programs, many of which are at for-profit colleges, would be required to prove that their graduates’ loan payments don’t exceed 20% of their discretionary income or 8% of their total earnings. Programs that failed to meet these metrics for multiple years could lose access to federal financial aid — a lifeblood for many colleges. The Obama-era Department of Education found earlier this year that more than 800 programs were failing to meet the rule’s requirements.
The for-profit college industry has come under fire in recent years after two large for-profit college chains collapsed amid accusations that they were misleading students. The gainful employment rule was one of several efforts by officials to crack down on the industry. Borrower advocates have expressed concern for months that DeVos’s Department would challenge those rules.