Biden is trying to kill higher education alternatives. Congress can stop him
Washington Examiner
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The Left has been trying to kill for-profit colleges for years, even though they often serve low-income students. Congress has only one more week to act to prevent President Joe Biden from administering a death blow.
At issue is a Department of Education regulation that would deny for-profit institutions federal financial aid if they fail to prove they are helping enough students find “gainful employment.” These burdensome and complicated regulatory requirements would not apply to traditional schools overwhelmingly controlled by left-wing academics. That’s no coincidence, of course. The purported goal of the regulation is to ensure that students don’t get bilked for supposedly worthless degrees and saddled with debt they can’t repay. But if so, why isn’t the regulation being applied to equally worthless degrees, such as in gender studies, from liberal schools?
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Then-President Barack Obama tried something similar in 2010, but federal courts ruled that the regulations were too capricious. Now, Biden is trying again. Some 700,000 students face losing access to about 1,700 programs likely to run afoul of the new regulation.
The “career colleges” affected are often less expensive than traditional universities and usually offer far greater flexibility for students. Courses are online and available during nontraditional hours, which means low-income workers can fit them into their lives in ways unavailable at a big brand-name college. Many students put such degrees to use in ways different from students on more traditional higher-education pathways, so the benefits can be just as real, even if not quite so immediate.
Centrist and conservative groups are objecting to Biden’s regulation, and its drawbacks are obvious to people of goodwill across the political spectrum. When Obama was pushing his gainful employment rules, it was Marc Morial, president of the liberal National Urban League, who complained they would predominantly hurt “at-risk students, including minorities, parents, and full-time workers.”
It would do so based on data skewed by the coronavirus pandemic, during which workplaces were shuttered and the government subsidized people to stay away from work. As the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute argued in June in lengthy comments on the Biden proposal, the rule effectively acts “retroactively” by basing new standards on that old, skewed, COVID-era data, even though the Supreme Court has held that agency “rulemaking authority [should] not … encompass the power to promulgate retroactive rules.”
Those and numerous other legal and logical objections to the Biden regulation are persuasive, even if some are as technical as the convoluted regulation itself. A bigger inequity, however, is more obvious. Because the rule does not apply to traditional, not-for-profit universities (except for some non-degree programs), it misses most college programs that, for employment purposes, are nearly worthless. Anyone who looks at the plethora of trendy course offerings in identity politics or “interdisciplinary” exotica will question why a state school offering something such as “Nonbinary Mohican Oral History” isn’t held to the same standard as an online university offering cosmetology courses for stay-at-home mothers who want to reenter the workforce.
If the Biden regulation were applied to traditional universities, their undergraduate offerings would account for nearly 80% of all “failing” programs in the nation, and if post-graduate degree-seekers weren’t excluded, traditional schools would account for 90%. Yet while Biden keeps trying unconstitutionally to forgive student debt at not-for-profit colleges offering useless courses that are, in essence, left-wing political indoctrination, he is punishing for-profit schools for supposedly luring students into debt. The double standard is stunning.
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The underlying story is that the education establishment, which is the Democrats’ chief economic paymaster, feels threatened by nontraditional academies. Leftist ideologues hate the very idea of profits, even if a vast market of nontraditional students finds value and opportunity in the training the for-profit schools provide.
If it acts by next week, Congress can block Biden by using the Congressional Review Act. It should do so. Biden is trying to deny low-income students options and stifle their aspirations. His proposal isn’t benevolent. It’s cruel.