Over the past several years, debate has raged among policymakers at the federal level about the best way to ensure for-profit colleges provide students with a decent college education, and don’t burden their students with high levels of debt they can’t repay.
Toward the end of their tenure, Obama administration officials implemented two rules aimed at cracking down on for-profit colleges, over resistance from Congressional Republicans and the for-profit college industry.
One, known as the gainful employment rule, required programs that train students for careers to show that a decent share of their graduates were successfully repaying their debts. The other, known as borrower defense, helped to make borrowers whole when they said they’d been scammed by their schools.