(Inside Higher Ed)
Education Department's decision to drop gainful-employment rule will mean lowest-performing programs keep $5.3 billion over next decade.
By Andrew Kreighbaum - August 13, 2018
More than 2,000 career education programs serving over half a million students risked losing access to Title IV federal student aid under the Obama administration’s gainful-employment rule.
Those programs look to be in the clear after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Friday she plans to rescind the regulation.
The move, which was widely expected and reported weeks earlier, is the latest step by DeVos to roll back Obama era student loan regulations that largely targeted the for-profit college sector. The announcement also made clear the Education Department’s new preference for consumer information in place of accountability rules that could trigger the loss of access to federal aid for programs that perform poorly on federal standards.
Rescinding the rule, the department estimates, will mean an additional $5.3 billion over 10 years goes to programs, most of them for-profit, that would likely otherwise be cut off from federal funds -- about $4.5 billion of that from Pell Grants and the rest from student loans.
. . .
Bob Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, said that taken together those steps amount to a “not-so-implicit stamp of approval on predatory colleges, while simultaneously stripping what few protections students have to protect themselves against abuse.”....
