What McAllen, Tex., Tells Us About Problems in the Gainful-Employment Rule
Josue Vasquez and Felida Villarreal
October 23, 2024
The new rule doesn’t account for gender, geographic and racial wage gaps, Josue Vasquez and Felida Villarreal write.
Hispanic women enter the workforce with two strikes against them.
The first strike: They’re women, who earn an average of 82 cents for every dollar paid to men.
The second strike: They’re Latina. Hispanic women workers in the McAllen region in South Texas earn less than 40 percent of what white non-Hispanic men make. Nationally, Latinas lose an estimated $1.2 million in earnings over a 40-year working career because of these wage gaps.
The U.S. Department of Education’s latest update to the gainful-employment rule could be a third strike. A new income threshold test would require a majority of graduates of nondegree programs to be paid more than the median high school graduate in their state between the ages of 25 and 34. The change applies to all nondegree programs, including industry-aligned certificates for in-demand occupations that can be earned in less than a year. Programs that fall short on these new measures could lose access to federal financial aid.
