February 8, 2024

Gerard Scimeca
Chairman, CASE

The resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay elucidated elite academia’s wholesale abandonment of their core mission to educate and equip students to become responsible and productive members of society. Disturbingly, this abandonment has a willing accomplice in the Biden Administration.

The Department of Education’s (DOE) coddling of higher education’s storied ivory towers stands in stark contrast to their subterfuge against schools doing the actual work of producing skilled and essential professionals for our current and future workforce. Behind the cloak of the DOE, the White House is quietly targeting career colleges – schools providing career-oriented and on-the-job experiences to students across the country. The result is fewer choices for students who want to advance their career prospects, a trend that has long-term adverse implications for our economy and our nation’s workforce.

The Department has conducted an unrelenting vendetta against America’s career colleges, during both the Obama and Biden administrations, hurting the very students whose interests they are entrusted to protect. The consequences are already being felt in painful jobs losses for faculty and employees across the country. Worse, thousands of Americans are losing out on the opportunity to earn a degree and bolster our workforce.

The crusade against career colleges is not limited to the DOE. It is expanding, weaponizing other departments and employing the full force of the cudgels available to the bureaucracy. This is the case across the entire administration – from the Department’s punitive recrafting of its selectively applied Gainful Employment Rule to disconnecting schools and businesses from the ability to connect with potential students through the Federal Communications Commission.

In September, the Department of Education unveiled its newest iteration of the Gainful Employment Rule, which effectively targets students who want to attend career colleges. These institutions live outside the realm of the entrenched, elitist academic establishment. They primarily serve non-traditional students, such as working parents and veterans, by providing real and practical on-the-job experiences.

Implementation of the latest Gainful Employment Rule could, according to the DOE itself, adversely affect more than 700,000 students a year. As it is highly doubtful any of the ideological bureaucrats crafting these rules hold a commercial driver’s license or have been certified to work as a mechanic, a plumber, or an HVAC technician, their continued discounting of those who seek such training wreaks of snobbery and classism.

Most recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), with its current majority of Democrat appointees, adopted a rule to disconnect colleges and businesses with potential students and leads. The FCC is no stranger to this type of heavy-handed rulemaking that harms competitiveness, consumers, and business of all sizes. From net neutrality to digital discrimination, the FCC’s disdain for free markets has been on full display. In this instance, the result discourages millions of dollars in investments from private business in support of career-oriented education to enhance workforce development – a loss for businesses, students, and the economy.

The FCC’s latest action, “Targeting and Eliminating Unlawful Text Messages,” seeks to end the practice of relying on single consent from the consumer to apply simultaneously to multiple marketing partners. In reality, it means that businesses – including private, public, and career colleges – will be forced to take an additional step to conduct regular operations – or face retribution. In practice, colleges and businesses of all kinds follow up with potential students via phone or text. The FCC even acknowledges these types of services provide a real benefit to consumers. Despite this, they’ve chosen to move ahead with this rule.

Repeatedly, the Biden Administration has advanced ideology at the expense of sound policy and the best interests of the people. In this case, it has no interest in the success of colleges they cannot control. To the contrary, they want them gone. Its continued attacks on career colleges must be addressed by our elected officials. One route is through a Congressional Review Act (CRA), which would allow Republicans and Democrats in Congress who understand the value in increasing opportunities for their constituents to stop this madness and protect students and our nation’s future prosperity from this reckless and spiteful agenda.