Department of Education Protects Traditional Higher Ed by Demanding Different Rules for Career Colleges
As students flee four-year colleges and with public confidence in higher education at historic lows, crusading activist bureaucrats seek to prop up and perpetuate traditional universities’ government-mandated market advantages by selectively limiting access to career colleges.
As NDC noted in its landmark study, Condescending Paternalism: The Department of Education’s Unwarranted Limits on Veterans’ Earned Education Benefits, military and veteran students are not dumb. Military and veteran students don’t choose career colleges because they have no other options, but because it’s often their best option, being a better fit for their higher education needs. By seeking to put these schools at a disadvantage or possibly eliminate them entirely, the Department of Education and its allies in Congress threaten to limit education choice and force non-traditional students into programs that set them up to fail.
The Department of Education’s “Gainful Employment” (GE) Rule is one example of such activist federal bureaucrats tipping the scales in favor of traditional higher ed. Likewise, the “90/10” Rule, designed on dubious policy grounds, is only applied to career colleges, again to defend and reinforce the advantageous position of traditional higher ed.
Rather than encouraging private nonprofit, state-run, and community colleges to innovate, the Department of Education and some Members of Congress instead defend and prop up those failing educational models by using their Constitutionally questionable regulatory powers to place arbitrary and capricious regulatory hurdles in front of career colleges. Many traditional colleges and universities would go under if they were subjected to the same standards.
The Department of Education’s erratic application of enforcement standards also reveals an activist bureaucratic agenda against career colleges and non-traditional higher education options. For example, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found 10 of the 13 schools penalized by the Department of Education’s Student Financial Aid Office of Enforcement were career colleges, even though the GAO said in January of 2023 the Department of Education “has not completed written procedures for investigating colleges and has not updated its written procedures for imposing penalties for substantial misrepresentation.” Still, the Department of Education pressed forward to penalize the Department’s targeted schools.
Read more of NDC’s analysis in our Condescending Paternalism report.
