HBCU DIGEST: Gainful Employment policy will prove critical moment for HBCU mindfulness in Biden Administration

Today, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an editorial calling for historically Black college and university communities to support federal rulemaking on gainful employment. It is a rule that was kicked into hyper-drive during the Obama Administration to limit predatory enrollment in for-profit schools, scaled back during the Trump Administration, and is now being revisited under the Biden Administration as a vital element of federal student aid checks and balances. 

Under Obama and Trump, the HBCU community had many reasons for apprehension about how student debt and job earnings would define the value of a degree or care of an institution. Obama's ED made the rule a catchall that didn't consider race as a factor in how much debt students take on or how much they'll earn. From Politico in 2015:

The gainful employment regulation applies to community colleges and public universities, but for-profit programs fare worst under the rule’s key evaluation metric, a debt-to-earnings ratio. The industry, which collected about $22 billion in taxpayer loans and Pell Grants in 2013, says it’s being unfairly targeted, punished by the government for enrolling high-risk students — first-generation, adult, low-income and the like — who are less likely to repay loans but need access to the flexible models that for-profits provide.

Back then, the targeted profile for borrower defense regulation sounded a lot like HBCUs. Many HBCU leaders were worried that the similarities between for-profit schools and Black colleges in student profile and post-graduate outcomes would someday catch up with Black colleges under different political leadership.