Gainful Employment

The Gainful Employment Rule (GER) gives the Education Department the discretion to deny student loans for degrees or certificates in career training programs it deems inadequate with regard to the expected salary of graduates.

Kickstarted under President Obama and abandoned by President Trump, the Biden-Harris Education D4epartment has been planning the rule’s return since inauguration.

The fact the DoEd, which seeks to cancel up to one trillion dollars in federal student loans, is so focused on policing career colleges and the financial prospects of their degree programs, underscores its biased agenda.

A few disturbing facts about Gainful Employment:

• The GER does not apply to degrees from traditional public or elite 4-year universities, where students are more than welcome to take on six-figures of debt to obtain a degree in philosophy, English, or interpretative puppetry.
• The most recent rule measures post-graduation salaries in reference to workers with no more than a high school diploma. This is a completely arbitrary standard that has not received even the slightest economic study or analysis to determine its value, and allows the DoEd to play career counselor to thousands of working adults seeking greater opportunity and new job skills.
• The DoEd assures it will give colleges under scrutiny ample opportunity to demonstrate that targeted degree and certificate programs lead to better employment opportunities, but it is a “guilty until proven innocent” system that will naturally be expensive and time consuming for institutions that don’t have millions in taxpayer subsidies to support them.

If federal student loans are to be conditioned upon future salary prospects, then they should apply to ALL institutions and ALL programs of study equally. The commonsense option is to abandon random litmus tests for obtaining loans, and instead let students and the marketplace decide what opportunities await those seeking training in each field. There are numerous ways the DoEd could ensure students are not ensnared into a hopeless sea of debt without weaponizing the GER to selectively harm schools.