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Rep. John Kline (R-Minn) is apparently using budget legislation to prevent the Department of Education from instituting its Gainful Employment rules, which will prevent for-profit colleges who saddle students with too much debt from taking advantage of federal financial aid.
According to a piece in Inside Higher Ed:
In an interview in his office… Kline, chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said that he and three other lawmakers would sponsor an amendment to the continuing resolution legislation that the House could take up as early as today. The measure would bar the Education Department from using any of its appropriated funds in 2011 to promulgate or enforce the gainful employment regulations, which for-profit college officials have fought on a variety of fronts.
Kline, who spoke with reporters along with Representative Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat, said the lawmakers were confident that the House would pass the legislation, and hoped that that vote would send a “strong signal” to “the administration and our friends in the Senate” that “somebody ought to take another look at” the wisdom and fairness of the rules. “We have an opportunity right now to make a statement.”
And what would that statement be (“I am a tool of one of America’s most disreputable business sectors”)? As I’ve pointed out before, Kline’s opposition to further rules on how for-profit colleges do business is quite clear. His reasoning, however, is vague. Why would taking this action against the Department of Education be good policy? How would this make things better?
It may be simply a delay tactic, however. According to an article by John Lauerman at Bloomberg News:
The House proposed amendment would block funding for the gainful employment rule for the remainder of the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, and would provide more time to change the department’s plan, Kline said. The amendment also would stop government rules scheduled to go into effect July 1 requiring for-profit colleges to notify the department before offering new courses, he said.
Kline’s actions wouldn’t actually change the Gainful Employment rules, which fall under the power of the executive branch of government; it would simply cut off funding so the Department of Education couldn’t successfully implement them.
The Education Trust’s Kati Haycock sent a letter all members of the U.S. House of Representatives urging them to oppose Kline’s tactics.
The “wisdom and fairness of the rules,” Haycock implies, are not really a matter of debate. Under the proposed rules proprietary schools would be ineligible for federal financial aid if they gave students debt above 12 percent of their income and if their students had loan repayment rates below 35 percent.
“Programs that can’t meet this extraordinarily low bar,” Haycock writes, “plainly provide little or no benefit to their students or taxpayers.”
For-profit colleges make most of their revenue, as much as 90 percent, from federal grants and loans. [Image via]
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Trace Urdan on February 16, 2011 1:17 PM:
Despite the persistent implication that profit corrupts, there has been a dearth of evidence to support the notion that any of the for-profit schools are peddling an inferior product. Rather, outcome measures (particularly the new repayment rate metric) reflect with a very high R-squared, the socio-economic background and race of the students being served. This is immediately obvious by scanning the metrics associated with HBCUs. Any community college educator that is being honest will likewise acknowledge that completion has more to do with personal circumstances than program support or even academic preparedness.
Besides that the notion that training and education leads automatically to employment divorced of effort or attitude on the part of the prospective employee is something that anyone that has ever tried to seek employment knows is a ridiculous notion.
So the net effect of the new rules will simply be to force for-profit schools to be more discriminating in whom they admit and access will suffer at the hands of outcomes. But not academic outcomes, but loan repayment outcomes.
So some students will be spared the cost of their own failure. But others, that had the potential to succeed and turn their lives around will be ignored as well.
The myth that these students squeezed out of the for-profit sector will then be served by lower-cost state-funded institutions is ludicrous at multiple levels. First, these institutions (which by the way have similar or worse completion rates with similar populations) have no funding to serve a sizable increase in demand. But more importantly, state-funded institutions have no understanding of how to attract these students. Many have expressly rejected community colleges, but more still simply haven't been engaged by them. No one criticizing for-profit schools seems able to explain how it is that less expensive schools have failed this population of would be students so utterly and sent them in such large numbers into the arms of for-profit schools.
So as a matter of national policy if we want to reduce the number of poor and minority students being served by Title IV and reach a consensus as a nation that there are a individuals that cannot be helped by education, then let's have that discussion honestly.
But I suspect that Chairman Kline disagrees with that view. And with all the self-styled consumer advocates that don't have enough respect for their would-be constituencies to allow them to make up their own mind where to spend their tuition benefits.