This past Tuesday, while everyone was talking about Elijah Cummings and gearing up for the debates, Betsy DeVos’ Department of Education gave the for-profit educational sector some very good news: A few months after reinstating the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), the group that certifies and polices many for-profit educational institutions, it seemed to give the failing accrediting group another pass.
The Obama administration had revoked the ACICS’s ability to accredit, thereby closing it because it somehow missed the signs when three large for-profits went bankrupt, leaving thousands of students burdened with massive debt and no path to complete their degrees.
This followed on the heels of DeVos’ June 28 repeal of an Obama-era rule called the gainful employment rule. The rule, promulgated in 2014, was designed to rate higher-ed programs based on how much economic security they delivered for graduates, and punish those that charged students too much and delivered too little. Most education reformers liked it, such as those affiliated with the Century Foundation, but for-profit schools hated it: In 2017, the first year that the ratings were released, 98 percent of the programs that didn’t meet the standards were run by for-profits.