How a Strong Gainful Employment Rule Would Have Helped Corinthian Students

In May, we wrote about the 114 career education programs from which more students default than graduate (it’s actually even worse than that since they have more defaulters in one year than graduates over two years). With Corinthian Colleges now preparing to sell or close all of its campuses, it is worth noting that Corinthian runs 25 of the 114 programs with more defaulters than graduates.

These programs are shockingly bad. Everest College Phoenix Associates’ programs in Securities Services Administration and Management, and in Business, Management and Marketing both had more than three times as many defaulters as graduates. Everest University in Tampa has an Associate’s degree program in Computer and Information Sciences that also has three times as many defaulters as graduates.

An effective gainful employment regulation would help protect students and taxpayers from schools like Corinthian. By enforcing the law requiring career education programs to prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation, a strong rule would hold programs to clear outcome standards and measure their performance against those standards regularly. It would force the worst performing programs to improve or lose eligibility for funding before burying countless students with debts that may haunt them for the rest of their lives.

We and more than 50 other organizations submitted written comments urging the Education Department to improve its draft gainful employment rule to better protect students and taxpayers, including by requiring schools to provide financial relief for students in programs that lose eligibility, limiting enrollment in poorly performing programs until they improve, and closing loopholes and raising standards. If a rule with the changes we called for had already been in effect, Corinthian would long ago have had to rapidly improve or close programs in a way that better protected students and taxpayers.

The final gainful employment rule will be too late to protect Corinthian students, but it is not too late to protect the millions of students enrolling in other schools’ career education programs and the taxpayers who subsidize them.

Click here for a sortable list of the 114 programs with more defaulters in one year than graduate over two years. To read the New York Times editorial on our May blog post, click here.