What Do “Gainful Employment” Regulations Accomplish?https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2023/08/what-do-gainful-employment-regulations-accomplish/The Biden administration will soon implement a set of regulations that are commonly known as “Gainful Employment.” These regulations would restrict some college programs’ eligibility to participate in federal financial-aid programs like Pell grants and student loans.
The Higher Education Act, originally passed in 1965 and amended many times over the years, includes a provision that requires “vocational” programs to prepare students for “gainful employment.” The law defines vocational programs as any program at a for-profit college, as well as any non-degree program (e.g., certificate programs) at public and private non-profit colleges.
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But the law is silent on the definition of “gainful employment,” and, until 2010, no presidential administration had bothered to try to define it. That year, the Obama administration tried to do so in large part by utilizing student-loan repayment rates, the logic being that if a program succeeds in preparing its students for vocational success, then those students should be able to repay their loans. Programs where the repayment rate was too low would lose eligibility for federal financial aid.
However, the courts threw out the Obama regulations, and one of the reasons was that the repayment-rate threshold was chosen to ensure that an (arbitrarily) predetermined share of for-profit programs would fail.
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But gainful employment also has a darker side. In particular, it is clear that progressives are not implementing gainful employment as part of a broader push for accountability but, rather, because it allows them to selectively punish for-profit colleges, whose existence they find intolerable.
This is clear for several reasons. First, early GE efforts tried to apply accountability to for-profits alone. Progressives relented on including non-degree programs at public and private non-profits only because the language in the Higher Education Act makes it very difficult to treat the two differently.
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It is clear to anyone following gainful employment that progressives are using it, as much as possible, to selectively target for-profit colleges. To them, non-degree programs at public and private non-profit colleges should be provided get-out-of-jail-free cards when possible, with the remainder of programs simply being collateral damage.
But selective accountability is not accountability, it is persecution. ...
Howzabout this "repayment rate" test - which is highly flawed, depending on grads'
choices, not opportunities and means - be applied to ALL universities and colleges?
