Third Way Statement on Gainful Employment Rule Protecting Students and Taxpayers

WASHINGTON — Third Way released the following statement from Lanae Erickson, Senior Vice President for Social Policy, Education & Politics:

“Today, the Department of Education released its proposed Gainful Employment (GE) rule—an essential tool to protect the higher education investment of students and taxpayers from flowing to predatory programs that leave folks worse off than if they’d never enrolled. We are grateful for the Department’s ongoing efforts to develop a robust rule that will hold these federally-funded programs accountable when they fail to deliver any meaningful returns to students.

“Reinstating the GE rule has been a long time coming. The Trump Administration rescinded this crucial guardrail, allowing students to continue using taxpayer-funded student aid at hundreds of programs that left them in towering debt with no earnings prospects to pay it off. The Department’s proposed rule takes a smart and proven approach to assessing value—identifying programs that consistently fail to equip their graduates to succeed in the job market, pay down their debt, or even earn more than they could have with only a high school diploma. We know that students pursue career training with their future job prospects top of mind. The addition of a requirement that most students go on to earn more than a high school graduate is a welcome improvement, as the prior rule would have allowed 96% of the more than 1,700 career programs that leave their graduates earning below the poverty line to continue to access federal grants and loans.

"Statutorily, GE can only be applied to career education programs. The Department’s addition of required financial value transparency disclosures using the GE metrics for all programs at all institutions is a game-changing move that will equip students with better information on the outcomes they can expect from different programs.

“We urgently need a strong GE rule to ensure that taxpayer-funded career education programs are held accountable for meeting baseline standards of quality and preparing students for the careers they advertise. Third Way applauds the Department’s dedication to strengthening GE through these core guardrails—and we are adamant that those guardrails must be maintained in the final rule to protect students from high-cost, low-quality programs that leave them worse off than when they started.”