Civil Rights Groups Urge Education Department to Issue “Gainful Employment” Regulation
A group of civil rights, education, labor, and consumer organizations, including The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, sent a letter yesterday to the Department of Education in support of a proposed regulation of for-profit colleges that will spare millions of students “entry into a proven dead-end educational track, while also sparing taxpayers otherwise on the hook for their federal student loans.”
For-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix have recently come under fire for targeting low-income and minority students for admission to programs that do not lead to “gainful employment” and leave students with a mountain of student-loan debt – while the schools themselves make billions. Students enrolled in for-profit schools represent just 10 percent of all college students in the United States but account for 44 percent of all student-loan defaults. New data released today by the Education Department found that a quarter of all federal student loan borrowers at for-profit colleges defaulted on their loans within three years of beginning to repay them, which is more than twice the rate of their counterparts at nonprofit colleges and university.
The letter states: “[T]he civil and human rights community supports policies that maximize meaningful post-secondary educational and equitable employment opportunities. Unfortunately, too many for-profit college recruitment practices targeted at vulnerable students appear to sacrifice ‘quality’ college opportunities in favor of ‘quantity’ profits for the institutions. It is worth noting, however, that we do not believe all for-profit colleges are bad actors. The way to separate the wheat from the chaff is to finalize and enforce a vigorous gainful employment rule.”
Under the rule, for-profit colleges that fail to demonstrate that their programs are preparing students for “gainful employment” would risk losing their eligibility to participate in federal education grant and loan programs. The letter urges Duncan to “act quickly and decisively” to issue the rule to enable “long overdue federal enforcement” of the law.
“For-profit colleges have launched an all-out campaign using the American Dream as bait to trap vulnerable students into underperforming schools and saddle them with a lifetime of debt,” said Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president of The Leadership Conference, in a statement. “We support the education department’s efforts to hold these schools accountable by issuing this rule and vigorously enforcing it.”