Gainful Employment: Using Data to Examine Potential Effects of a High School Earnings Threshold

Issued in 2014, the Education Department implemented the Gainful Employment (GE) Rule to protect students from low-quality postsecondary programs that often left them with unaffordable student debts and non-transferrable credits. Unfortunately, the last administration halted the 2014 GE Rule upon taking office, and then officially rescinded the rule in 2019.

Since taking office, the Biden administration has moved to restore GE. The administration’s recently presented proposal would create an earnings threshold metric to complement the 2014 rule’s debt-to-earnings metric and set a new GE rule.

In a new brief, TICAS models how the proposed threshold would potentially affect GE programs. Findings show that for-profit institutions would operate the largest share of failing GE programs.