Axtman is a undergraduate student for Medill on the Hill, a program of Northwestern University in which students serve as mobile journalists reporting on events in and around Washington, D.C.
The Biden administration has taken aim at the for-profit college industry with a new rule to help prevent students from being saddled with massive debts. The fate of the program, however, could lie in who occupies the White House in 2025.
In September, the Department of Education announced its final Gainful Employment Rule (GER), which compels for-profit institutions and certificate programs to demonstrate that students who attend their schools fare better than if they had not attended.
Experts say the rule will save taxpayer dollars and hold for-profit institutions accountable. The Biden administration predicts the plan will protect approximately 700,000 students; however, the plan has not garnered support from both sides of the political aisle.
The GER, which was first enacted by the Obama administration in 2014, limits a student’s debt based on the borrower’s income, but the Trump administration abandoned this rule.
The Biden administration reinstated the rule and added a new provision requiring half of the graduates of the college programs to have higher earnings than someone who only has a high school diploma, which is about $25,000 nationally, but varies by state.
If a school fails these measures twice in a three-year period, it lose federal aid eligibility, which is a serious blow to their profits. According to estimates from the Brookings Institution, all for-profit colleges generate at least 70 percent of revenue from federal sources.
“The idea is that students will probably be less likely to enroll in those programs because they will no longer have access to the aid that they need to afford them, which will redirect students into programs that are more affordable and have better outcomes,” said Lydia Franz, a policy associate for the Institute for College Access & Success, a nonprofit that advocates for students to receive affordable and quality higher education.
Unlike nonprofit universities, for-profit institutions are not required to invest students’ tuition back into the school. They function as a business, meaning investors and stakeholders can make financial gains from the school. As a result, for-profit institutions are often more expensive.
Representatives of the for-profit sector say the gainful employment regulation unfairly targets their industry. Jason Altmire is president of Career Education College and Universities, a national association representing over 1,100 campuses. He said several programs at public and nonprofit colleges do not yield high wages after graduation, yet they are not subject to the same rules.
Plus, he said some research does not acknowledge the nuances in the for-profit industry, like the outcomes of students from four-year, primarily online for-profit schools and shorter programs offered by career-oriented for-profit schools. It’s not comparing “apples to apples,” he said.
“The problem with the gainful employment regulations is they apply almost exclusively only to for-profit schools,” Altmire said. “We believe that accountability measures should apply to all schools in all sectors, every type of school so that all students can have the benefit of those protections.”
Because the rule is set to take effect July 1, 2024, the earliest a college program will lose federal aid is 2026.
This comes at a time where many institutions in the sector are already facing slumping enrollments, state and federal lawsuits, and bankruptcy. Cazenovia College, Holy Names University and Living Arts College, which all closed in the spring, are among the for-profit institutions that have shut their doors.
College closures often come unexpectedly and have damaging effects on students, causing many to end their pursuit of a college degree, according to a 2022 report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Of the 467 closed institutions the report examined, 50 percent were private, for-profit, two-year colleges, and 28 percent were private, for-profit, four-year colleges.
Harry Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University, said experts can disagree on specific measures used to regulate the for-profit college industry, but there should be legislation in place.
“It's reasonable for the federal government to say, ‘You want this public money, you better have at least some minimal level of results and not stick unknowing consumers with the defaults and debts,’” he said.
However, regulatory action will depend on who wins the 2024 presidential election.
Former President Donald Trump, who has a huge lead in Republican primary polling, did away with the rule during his term, and other leading voices in the party share his view.
In an open letter, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chairwoman of the Education and the Workforce Committee, and Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), chairman of the Higher Education and Workforce subcommittee on development, wrote the rule uses “arbitrary metrics” and “overly burdensome and unnecessary requirements.”
Both lawmakers also receive the highest contributions from the for-profit industry, with Foxx bringing in $125,650 and Burgess accepting $29,754 during the 2021-2022 election cycle, according to data from OpenSecrets.
“I welcome accountability and transparency in postsecondary education,” Foxx wrote in a press release. “It is desperately needed. But this regulatory package is simply the same witch hunt we’ve seen the Biden administration carry out over the last two years to undercut an entire sector of institutions that serves the needs of veterans, minorities, and other disadvantaged students that Democrats claim they care about.”
However, Franz said for-profit institutions often hurt rather than help these populations. She said the for-profit sector warrants stricter regulations due to its clear history of leaving students with worse outcomes.
Other institutions that serve minority populations, like Historically Black Colleges and Universities and community colleges, do not produce these same results, she said. Their students graduate and are able to pay off their debts at higher rates.
“There is bipartisan acknowledgement that the rule will have a significant impact, but those views vary widely across constituencies,” Franz said, who identified common themes in the thousands of public comments the Education Department received about the new gainful employment policy.
The previous rule already had a significant effect on the sector, said Sandy Baum, a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy. In 2010, 1.7 million students attended a for-profit institution as compared to about 800,000 in 2021, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Baum ascribes that decrease, in part at least, to for-profit institutions trying to improve and become more responsible.
“[Before] they were enrolling anybody who would sign on the dotted line,” she said, noting that she was describing a widespread – but not universal – practice. “They would go to homeless shelters and recruit people because all they wanted was their money, and it didn't matter if they dropped out quickly.”
Despite the topic not being inherently political, she said gainful employment has become divisive due to powerful lobbying groups. When the Obama administration first tried to introduce policy on gainful employment, it faced legal disputes for four years before the final rule was published.
Altmire, who served three terms in the House of Representatives, said there will likely be a new lawsuit to protest Biden’s updated rule.
In the meantime, Altmire fears the effects of this rule could go even further regardless of who serves in the White House.
“If you look at a different president, maybe a Republican president, who doesn't hold community colleges or public universities or elite universities in high regard, these same types of rules could very easily be weaponized against those kinds of schools,” Altmire said.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.