February 8, 2012

Online schools continue to be concerned over State approval requirements

government cracking down on collegesMany of the school systems we have spoken to continue to stress about the state approval requirements due to be in place by July.. It’s hard to imagine the burden the Govt. has placed on the many high quality education providers within our industry.  Clearly many of them will not be able to achieve overall approval by the deadline.  Does that only hurt the school or company?  What about the students that have begun working towards their degrees?  They continue to raise the bar as they go, yet they fail to even  pretend to hold traditional post secondary institutions as accountable…

The common response from the govt. is that we need to continue to install checks and balances, yet they clearly have no checks and balance to the plethora of new rules & laws that they create.   Wouldn’t common sense dictate that an easy check and balance would be what’s good for the goose is good for the gander?   Why don’t they hold all colleges and universities to the same standards?

Gainful employment, what it can mean to forprofit schools

During long winded negotiated rulemaking for Higher Education, the US DOE proposed defining gainful employment by establishing a 8% debt to income threshold (debt to income is also commonly used for mortgage limits) based on median student debt for recent college graduates with income based either on Bureau of Labor Statistics 25th percentile wage data or actual college graduate earnings. Loan payments would be based on the standard repayment plan (10 years) for the unsubsidized Stafford loan program. For programs that failed to satisfy this standard, the US Department of Education proposed an alternative that requires a loan repayment rate for recent college graduates of 90%. The loan repayment rate measures the percentage of borrowers actively repaying their loans/ and not defaulting. It is a dual to the default rate, but also includes borrowers who are delinquent, in an economic hardship deferment or in forbearance along with borrowers who are in default.

Mark Kantrowitz has written a piece that’s worthwhile reading.  Click the link below to view Marks piece:

http://www.finaid.org/educators/20100301gainfulemployment.pdf

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