An Obama Policy ‘To Protect Students and Taxpayers’ Is in Danger of Not Happening
For years, the Obama administration has promised to punish for-profit colleges that produce graduates who can’t afford their student loan payments. The plan, known as the gainful employment rule, would publicly shame colleges that do their students more harm than good, and would threaten these schools’ access to federal student aid. The administration has described the plan as its “signature effort to protect students and taxpayers.”
But before it can punish career schools for impoverishing their students, the department needs to collect data on how much students are paying — and how much they’re earning. And now, “defects“ plaguing a new, multimillion-dollar online portal that was supposed to manage that data have forced the department to temporarily abandon the system.
The technical snafu has left some administration officials fearing that the Education Department will miss its own deadline for poor-performing schools to suffer consequences before President Barack Obama leaves office. Should that happen, it would leave Obama’s successor the power to derail the administration’s most ambitious attempt to protect students from schools that take in taxpayer-subsidized student loans and grants but provide substandard education.
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