The accountability regulation wasn’t perfect, but it worked in weeding out poorly performing programs, Jonathan Kaplan writes. Let’s improve it, not kill it.
This past summer, the Trump administration’s Department of Education repealed the controversial gainful-employment regulation, which required all programs at for-profit universities as well as career-oriented programs at nonprofit schools to meet a quantitative threshold to remain eligible for federal financial aid. The repeal received significant attention from the news media and higher education officials. Advocates for the proprietary college sector generally hailed the repeal; consumer groups railed against it.
But an equally important gainful-employment story has garnered little attention. A sizable study of programs run by for-profit colleges, conducted by researchers at Seton Hall University, found last month that “passing GE was associated with a lower likelihood of a program or college closing.”
This suggests that the GE regulation, before its demise, achieved one of its stated policy goals: encouraging for-profits to examine with more intention the financial return of their programs for students.