Gerard Scimeca – Chairman, CASE
July 15, 2019
https://bit.ly/2XO2ymF
President Trump schooled Democrats once again last month with the announcement by his Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, that the Obama-era Gainful Employment Rule (GER) is being scrapped. The decision was made late on a Friday, likely to minimize the Democrats’ ability to fill the news cycle with declarations of outrage and contrived exasperations on behalf of ‘students.’ Of course the howls of protest are sure to continue, and Democrats will do their very best to mislead the public both on the GER and Trump’s overall agenda of education reform.
Like nearly all of Obama’s regulatory actions, the GER was a massive overreach by the federal government, this time into higher education, giving the federal government broad powers to regulate for-profit colleges based on the future income of their students. Just as Obama did with healthcare, energy, and financial services, his administration introduced countless rules into the education bureaucracy to hamstring career-oriented colleges and coddle the elite (i.e., taxpayer funded) education establishment. The cornerstone to that citadel of perpetual federal domination was the GER, which Trump and DeVos thankfully dispatched in order to sever the bureaucratic tentacles put in place by their predecessors.
The GER was an outrageous concept, empowering federal bureaucrats to decide whether a degree earned at a career-oriented college was sufficient or required federal intervention. Students studying to become a chef, a mechanic, a groundskeeper, or any other profession, were subject to regulations that could lead their student loan funding being reduced or pulled altogether. Other bureaucratic remedies could include changes to the college’s curriculum or work-study requirements. Through the magic of the GER, a literal bureaucrat sitting in Washington suddenly becomes both a guidance counselor for student curricula and job-skills advisor dictating a career path. And you thought your parents meddled too much in your college decision?
