NDC Applauds Dept. Ed’s 90/10 Revision, Calls for Permanent Repeal

This month the U.S. Department of Education revised its interpretation of the controversial 90/10 Rule, allowing proprietary schools to count revenue from online programs towards the required 10 percent of revenue that must come from non-federal student aid. 

The change offers a “long overdue correction to a stipulation adopted outside the proper rulemaking process, which put nontraditional colleges… at an arbitrarily uncompetitive marked disadvantage to conventional public and private nonprofit schools,” National Defense Committee Executive Director Bob Carey writes in a letter to the Department this week. 

The online revenue exclusion was an error to begin with. “Online program revenue was not discussed in the context of the 90/10 Rule during the negotiated rulemaking hearing, but somehow it found its way into the regulation’s preamble and was adopted as doctrine by the Education Department,” Mr. Carey wrote in recent op-ed for Stars & Stripes.

“The previous administration conveniently disregarded this regulatory overreach. It was focused on driving career colleges, which the Biden team apparently disdained, out of business—despite their growing popularity, especially among military and veteran students,” Mr. Carey’s letter states. 

One study that found 80% of public two-year colleges and 40% of public four-year colleges would be found out of compliance with the 90/10 Rule if it were applied uniformly to all schools.

Now is the time for the Department to retire the 90/10 Rule for good, Mr. Carey concludes. “We encourage you, Madam Secretary, to… build on this momentum by directing the recently announced RISE and AHEADNegotiated Rulemaking Committees to rescind the 90/10 Rule once and for all.”

Read NDC’s full letter here.