Are You Gainfully Employed? Setting Standards for For-Profit Degrees

The subject of the event was for-profit higher education. Representatives from the financial sector had come to New America, a nonpartisan public policy institute, to hear a high-level Obama administration official talk about a regulatory controversy that could make them—or lose them— hundreds of millions of dollars. Just a few days before, the U.S. Department of Education had released a new proposal that would make it more difficult for for-profits to access billions of dollars in federal funds. At the center of the proposal is a rule called “gainful employment” that would penalize forprofit colleges and other vocational training programs for saddling students with more debt than they can pay back.