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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.