Blog Post | October 30, 2014

What the Final Gainful Employment Rule Means for Parasitic Programs

Accountability Gainful Employment

The release of the final gainful employment rule today is a step in the right direction, but the following examples of programs that meet the final standards make clear just how modest a step it is.

The draft rule released in March would have 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.

Based on the data released in conjunction with the draft rule, we identified 114 career education programs where more students default than graduate. In other words, these are programs where students receiving federal aid to attend these programs are more likely to find themselves unable to repay their debt than they are to complete the program. The particularly shocking part was that, under the draft rule, 20% of these programs passed the Department’s proposed tests, underscoring the need for the rule to be strengthened.

So, what does final rule, which eliminated the use of program-level cohort default rates, mean for those 114 programs that we called parasitic because of their consumption of resources to the detriment of students and taxpayers? It means that 15 more of them will pass the gainful employment tests (in addition to the 23 that passed the draft rule’s tests). Fully one-third (33%) of the 114 parasitic programs would now pass, giving schools no incentive to improve them.

Of the 15 newly passing programs, seven are at the University of Phoenix and include the following:

  • The associate’s degree in web page, digital/multimedia and information resources design, from which the almost 1,600 borrowers who entered repayment defaulted at a rate of 47%.
  • The associate’s degree in corrections and criminal justice, with a cohort default rate of 44% and where the number of defaulters exceeded the number of graduates by more than 3,000.
  • The associate’s degree in professional, technical, business, and scientific writing, where more than four times as many students default as graduate (316 students default vs. 70 students who complete).

For more information about the final gainful employment rule and what more should be done, see our statement here.