Efforts by lobbyists from for-profit colleges – including some of the largest online education programs – fell short last week when Congress passed a compromise budget bill that would allow the Education Department (ED) to move ahead with its long-awaited “gainful employment” regulations.
In an April 11 statement, Harris Miller, president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), said the group’s last-ditch try to get the House and Senate to include a provision that would de-fund ED’s for-profit rulemaking was not included in the final budget that will fund the federal government through September.
APSCU asked its members to call their Congressional representatives as the final budget was being finalized, not conceding defeat on the for-profit regulations – known as “gainful employment” rules — until the bill became law.
The for-profit regulations pushed by the Obama administration for more than two years would affect some of the nation’s largest online colleges, such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University, by stripping schools of federal loan money if too many of their students maintain high loan debt-to-income ratios, among other provisions.
Miller said for-profit college advocates wouldn’t stop their fight against the government rules, which are expected to take effect in July 2012.
The final budget’s green light for ED officials to proceed with regulations “won’t stop our efforts to fight for our schools and our students,” he said.
Miller added: “By continuing to work with Congress, and with our member schools and their students, we intend to hold Secretary Duncan to his word that the final gainful employment regulation will be ‘much more thoughtful and much better for the country than the original proposal.’”
By failing to de-fund ED’s rulemaking, lawmakers “missed an opportunity to protect 2 million nontraditional students nationwide and ensure that they can continue to access a full spectrum of higher education that includes private sector colleges and universities,” Miller said.
The provision to block ED from implementing the rules passed in the Republican-controlled house this month, but didn’t receive the needed support in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
Although the anti-regulation provision was pushed primarily by Congressional Republicans, a bipartisan letter was submitted April 4 that would have barred ED from implementing the new regulations on for-profit programs.
The letter supporting the end of gainful employment rules – signed by 12 House members — charged that regulating for-profit colleges would “harm job creation” and prevent 400,000 people annually from entering the workforce with “new skills.”
“These regulations are a clear example of federal overreach into the affairs of American institutions of higher education,” the letter said.
A report released this month by the National Center for Education Statistics showed the massive growth in for-profit education over the past decade. The ratio of students who attend private nonprofit institutions to for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix has fallen from 3-to-1 to 2-to-1 in the 2000s.
For-profit college enrollment skyrocketed from about 550,000 in 1998 to more than 1.8 million in 2008, according to research published by Campus Progress, a left-leaning organization that advocates for for-profit regulations.
APSCU helped lead the charge against regulations aimed at for-profit schools, many of them with national online programs that have attracted millions of new students during the economic downturn that began in 2008.
Larry Penley, former president of Colorado State University (CSU) and a critic of gainful employment rules, said the government’s crackdown on for-profit colleges would hinder the schools’ use of educational technology that has attracted nontraditional students.
“The use of new technology in the for-profit industry is one of their greatest assets in improving the overall quality of higher education,” Penley said in his blog. “With online classes, web-based faculty-student discussions, eTextbooks, and online access to libraries, for-profit universities are transforming the industry and becoming formidable competitors of traditional schools. [Gainful employment] would be a disservice to students, an impediment to the economy’s recovery, and a strike against innovation in education.”
Rules that would strip for-profit schools of critical federal funds if they fail to meet certain criteria will limit the expansion of higher education during a time when online courses make college degrees available to students who can’t attend on-campus classes, Penley added.
“This is not the time to restrict our higher education system, especially the part of it that has the resources to invest in improvements in learning,” he said.
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