I believe that one of the best policies of President Barack Obama’s administration was his Education Department’s “gainful employment” rule. This rule cut off the student loan spigot for for-profit colleges that fail to prepare their students for the real world and place them in good jobs after graduation.
To me, this rule looked like something conservatives and liberals should agree on. It ended a taxpayer subsidy that was going down the bottomless hole of someone’s scam. And I felt vindicated as I saw so many people from both parties submit op-eds arguing against it — singing for their supper, it seemed to me. The for-profit college industry was eager to protect its taxpayer-funded gravy train, and I was happy to watch it dry up.
But, if the gainful employment rule had a flaw, it was the one that eventually provided Education Secretary Betsy DeVos her reason to rescind it, namely, that it discriminates unfairly against for-profit colleges despite the fact that so many nonprofit and public schools are equally worthless to the students who attend them.
And this has now been proven true. Inside Higher Ed reported this week on a clever project by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, whose work I always enjoy. The TPPF simply took public information about various nonprofit and public schools and applied the Obama rule’s criteria to them. Their tool allows the user to look at the median income and debt levels of graduates from thousands of degree programs one year after graduation. The results are about what you’d expect.
This compares to about 56 percent of private, for-profit schools.
Mind you, I wish this policy were reinstated. It’s much better to stop at least one of the many scams that comprise modern academia, even if you can’t stop all of them. But, given the ridiculous upward swing of college tuition and the decidedly negative contribution of academia to everything in society today save for engineering, science, and medicine, I’d much rather see such a policy applied to all colleges across the board.
I studied ancient Greek in college. I never believed that college was about finding a job. But I cannot agree with those who would count this as an argument against applying a gainful employment rule to all colleges. After all, for 50% of today’s college students, college is about finding a job; for 49%, it’s about having their hands held between high school and adulthood; and then the other 1% actually belong in college.
