A federal judge in Washington has overturned a main component of the federal Department of Education’s “gainful employment” rules, which were applied to career-training programs and were hotly contested by for-profit colleges, saying that regulation was arbitrary. The ruling by Judge Rudolph Contreras of Federal District Court was released on Saturday. The gainful-employment regulations, which were issued last year and were scheduled to go into effect on Sunday, were devised to prevent for-profit colleges, which get the bulk of their revenues from federal student aid, from leaving students with huge debt loads and credentials that provided little help in landing them a job.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/education/judge-strikes-a-for-profit-college-regulation.html