Friday, February 10, 2017

How much do for-profit colleges rely on federal funds? - Robert Kelchen, Brookings

The Obama administration emphasized gainful employment regulations that require graduates of vocationally-oriented programs to meet debt-to-earnings requirements and borrower defense to repayment rules (which will likely be quickly abandoned by the Trump administration) designed to help students who feel they were defrauded by their college. For-profit colleges that exceed 90 percent of their revenue from federal financial aid in two consecutive years can lose access to federal aid for the following two years. Very few colleges have crossed over the 90 percent threshold. But, roughly 200 for-profit colleges are almost entirely funded by the federal government, although some of this funding is returned to the government when students repay their loans. Yet this fact is obscured when military and veterans’ benefits are excluded from the calculations. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/01/11/how-much-do-for-profit-colleges-rely-on-federal-funds/