The Department of Education plans to repeal the Obama administration’s gainful employment rule, it announced Friday.
The rule sought to hold all career education and certificate programs — the vast majority at for-profit institutions — accountable for producing graduates with debt they couldn’t repay. Programs that repeatedly failed the metrics risked losing access to federal student aid.
The rule was contested heavily by the for-profit college sector but eventually went into effect in 2014. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she would suspend the rule last year though pending the outcome of a negotiated rule-making process, which finished earlier this year without producing a new regulation.
In place of the rule, the department plans to expand program-level outcomes data available from the College Scorecard but without any measures that punish those programs with poor outcomes. More program level data has long been a goal of advocates for higher ed transparency but will do nothing to placate advocates of more accountability for poor performing programs.