U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is under fire from student advocates once again for her recent decision to delay certain aspects of the Obama-era gainful employment regulation
The advocates’ ire is aimed at the Education Department’s decision last week to delay by six months — for the second time this year — the deadline for programs to file an “alternate earnings appeal” to avoid sanctions under the gainful employment rule.
The gainful employment regulation is designed to prevent students from leaving programs with too much debt and not enough earnings to pay it off. It applies to most for-profit programs and certificate programs at private non-profit and public institutions. The Department of Education is currently seeking to rewrite the regulation.
The decision to delay also allows programs to bypass a provision that would have required a 50 percent response rate for graduate surveys about earnings as long as programs include a “nonresponse bias analysis.” It also allows programs to include “any other information requested by the Secretary that indicates that the responses are a reliable measure of the program graduates’ true earnings.
Advocates decry the decision as “improper” and “illegal” and say it puts the interests of for-profit schools ahead of the interests of students.
“Weakening the appeals process is yet another extralegal action by the Department of Education to avoid enforcing a rule its political leadership does not like,” said Ben Miller, senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.
“The lack of any clear standards could let any appeal pass, regardless of how ridiculous or poorly designed it is,” Miller said.
