Gainful Employment: For-Profit Colleges Win Big with Elimination of Program-Level CDRs

The final gainful employment rule released last week eliminated a key accountability measure for career education programs. As a result, many programs that would have failed the draft rule will now pass the final rule.  While some have argued that this change was made to benefit public institutions, it’s clear that for-profit colleges – and the University of Phoenix in particular – were the biggest winners.

The draft rule released in March measured career education program outcomes in two ways. First, the debt burdens of program graduates who received federal aid would be compared to their later earnings. Second, students’ ability to repay their loans – including both graduates and noncompleters – would be measured through a program-level cohort default rate, or pCDR. But the final rule uses only one measure: the debt to earnings ratio of program graduates, or DTE.

There are 682 programs that failed the draft rule’s pCDR test but pass the final rule (including those exempted because they have very few graduates). The vast majority of these programs – 89% – are at for-profit colleges, and for-profit college programs account for 97% of the now-passing programs’ defaulters. University of Phoenix programs alone account for 43% of the defaulters at programs that pass the final rule because the pCDR was eliminated.