Whether you agreed or didn’t agree with the gainful employment regulations, it is clear that the information reported from these regulations were invaluable to the students who used them. Last week, we learned that the Dept. of Education has indicated that they will be repealing the 2014 gainful employment rules. Let’s not forget that the gainful-employment regulations “were established to respond to evidence that fraud, misrepresentation and unethical behavior were pervasive within the for-profit sector of higher education. That is not to say that all for-profit institutions are taking advantage of students and taxpayers, of course, but the industry included a lot of bad actors”.
What will replace the gainful employment rules? Well, the proposed solution is an expanded College Scorecard or another website that will display data about the mean salaries and debt loads for all institutions. There may be some merit that simplifying the burden on colleges, but there are many questions that should cause higher education leaders and educational consumers great concern. Jim Jump recently wrote in an article in insidehighered.com that he questions “how accurate and meaningful the information on the scorecard is and how effective the scorecard has been in helping consumers compare educational options”.
To read more, click here