Deep Dive: ED Releases Unofficial Final Rule on Gainful Employment and Financial Value Transparency Framework
Jill Desjean
October 6, 2023
Last week, the Department of Education (ED) released its unofficial final rule on Gainful Employment (GE) and its new Financial Value Transparency framework, which it plans to officially release in the Federal Register on October 10, 2023. The rule represents ED’s fourth effort, over more than a decade, to establish gainful employment standards, and ED’s first attempt at applying gainful employment metrics to non-GE programs, albeit without the associated penalties applicable to GE programs.
While the proposed rule released in May included draft regulations on financial responsibility, administrative capability, certification procedures, and ability to benefit, those regulations are currently under review at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and will be published separately at a later date.
Gainful Employment
The GE final rule largely mirrors what ED proposed in May. The department has retained the new earnings premium (EP) metric from the proposed rule, which will be calculated along with the debt-to-earnings (D/E) rate to determine GE program eligibility to participate in the Title IV student aid programs. Those metrics will also be used to provide information only to non-GE programs as part of the financial value transparency regulations, detailed later in this article.
