When representatives of Tennessee's for-profit higher-education sector walked into U.S. Rep. Phil Roe's office on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, they brought with them one agenda item.
In the previous few hours, they had already been in four meetings with policy makers, and they still had one more meeting to go. If the Education Department’s pending "gainful employment" rule went into effect, they were telling lawmakers, their futures—and their students’ futures—would be uncertain. The "obtuse and ill-defined" rule, they argued, would limit access to higher education for some students and impose unfair regulations on colleges.
The Tennessee group's visits to lawmakers' offices were part of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities' Hill Day, the group's annual meeting with members of Congress. According to Noah Black, a spokesman for Apscu, the principal trade group for for-profit colleges, 130 people from 30 institutions held 110 meetings with lawmakers during this year's Hill Day.
The proposed gainful employment rule, which would cut off federal aid to career-oriented programs whose borrowers have trouble repaying their debt, is certain to have figured in many of those conversations.
Close to 12,000 programs would be subject to the rule, and 13 percent of them would fail a two-part test the department proposed in a draft version of the rule, according to an analysis the department released late last year. Reaching a final version of the rule, however, has been a complicated process, following a federal judge's decision to overturn the original rule in 2012, a year after it was issued. A new version of the rule is expected to be unveiled by the Education Department this spring.
In their six meetings on the Hill on Wednesday, the group from Tennessee—J. Gary Adcox, executive director of the Tennessee Association of Independent Colleges and Schools; Cyndee Perdue Moore, vice president of National College; and Nickolas Worch, a 24-year-old student veteran at National College—told lawmakers that the gainful employment rule would have a negative effect on minority and veteran students in Tennessee, who largely rely on for-profit institutions for higher education.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Advocates-of-For-Profit-Higher/145233