Colleges Urge Education Department to Delay Gainful Employment… Again

Colleges and universities are once again urging the Department of Education to give them more time to comply with the reporting requirements in President Biden’s new gainful employment and financial value transparency rule.

It’s the third time institutions have sought an extension over the past year. This time around, they want the department to push back the current Jan. 15 deadline to July 2025. That would mean financial aid and student outcomes data, which are vital to enforcing the regulations, wouldn’t reach the department until well after the end of Biden’s presidency.

The rule, finalized last year, seeks to hold career education programs accountable and provide prospective students with more information about whether college programs pay off. To do so, the department needs to collect more data from colleges, including enrollment, the total cost of attendance and the amount of private loans disbursed to students. With that data in hand, the department will then calculate whether graduates of all programs can afford their yearly debt payments and whether they make more than an adult in their state who didn’t go to college.

Institutions are required to submit two years’ worth of data, and not all colleges have been keeping track of the appropriate data, complicating efforts to comply.

Policy experts are split over whether the incoming Trump administration will choose to uphold the accountability measure or roll it back entirely, as the former president did in his first term. And that uncertainty over the rule’s fate is partly why the American Council on Education wants to delay the deadline.

“Since a new administration would be implementing this regulation, there seems to be a preference to make sure that institutions are not doing a whole lot of work on the front end just to be told to redo it again,” said Emmanual Guillory, ACE’s senior director of government relations.

Guillory also noted that this request for another extension is not an attempt to get out of being held accountable entirely.

“We’re not trying to get out of it. It just needs to be fair for institutions as far as what’s expected of us, and [having] an adequate time frame to do that,” he said. “We can get information in, but it may not be accurate.”

Nonetheless, the Biden administration has said it’s moving full steam ahead and planning to uphold the current January due date.

“It’s long past time that—before they go into debt—students can get the facts on whether their college tuition will be a good investment. We have already extended these reporting deadlines twice, and we appreciate the many colleges and universities that have already shared their data,” undersecretary James Kvaal said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “It’s disappointing that some special interests want further delays that would only keep students in the dark, and we will not grant further extensions.”

‘Tale as Old as Time’

Even if it weren’t for concerns about how the change of administration could make the current deadline impractical, ACE and 49 other lobbying groups that cosigned a Dec. 13 letter to the department say many college and university staff members are already stretched thin and may not be able to accurately collect and report the data department officers are looking for.

The colleges made similar arguments earlier this year, specifically referencing disruptions caused by the botched rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, when they successfully convinced the department to push back the deadline twice. The data was initially due July 31, 2024.

More recently, an ACE survey of 355 presidents from public and private nonprofit institutions showed that 73 percent needed more resources to comply with the regulations. Forty percent said the guidance sent out by the department regarding how to report the data were not clear at all.

“We have asked for more time because the implementation of the process has not occurred according to the timeline the department originally outlined,” said David Baime, senior vice president of government relations for the American Association of Community Colleges. “The user guides that were fundamental to implementation and the completer lists [documents outlining what programs data should be provided for], which are sort of the fulcrum of the whole reporting structure, were both late.”

When the documents were made available, “they were flawed,” he added.

Like Guillory, Baime added that AACC “support[s] the goals of the regulation.” In the end, the framework established by the rule would actually benefit the colleges, providing them with a more comprehensive database, he said. But getting there requires “expansive” and “far-reaching” efforts, many of which fall on the shoulders of staff members already overloaded by the aftereffects of the FAFSA rollout.

“The colleges are spending hundreds of hours of work just doing their best to come into compliance,” he said. “We’re talking about student financial aid officers that were beleaguered to begin with.”

But Rachel Fishman, director of higher education at New America, a left-leaning think tank, doesn’t buy the institutional groups’ argument. She described their pushback and repeated request for extension as “a tale as old as time.”

“It’s all an effort to maintain a status quo for the industry at the end of the day … It’s a delaying tactic that they hope is going to work in their favor,” Fishman said. “Even in the most perfect circumstance, the same arguments would be made.”

She said the difficulties of collecting data for a new regulation program are “expected growing pains” and that even if there are imperfections, it’s better to get some data in students’ hands than none.

“We’re talking about information that will let students know which programs will pay off for them in terms of making more than a high school graduate. I mean, that is asking very little about program performance. Institutions wanting to delay that is concerning,” she said. “The first of anything is always going to be really challenging, on all ends, because we’re all learning as we go, but it is not insurmountable.”