Within just a few short months, there will be a new occupant of the Oval Office and, with that, a new administration in charge of the education and workforce regulatory regime. As one of the primary parties responsible for authorizing and holding accountable private-sector education and career-training providers, the regulatory processes that Uncle Sam oversees are massively consequential in shaping pathways to careers throughout the nation. Hence, with the election upon us, it’s worth considering the Biden-Harris administration’s legacy with regard to these regulatory practices, especially given that a Harris-Walz administration would likely sustain similar ones.
The results leave much to be desired. Over the past three and a half years, a steady stream of regulatory and sub-regulatory barriers enacted at the federal level have made it harder for career-training and education programs to connect people with jobs. Though intended to promote “consumer protection,” many of these barriers seem almost purposely designed to kill innovation and opportunity, not only deterring new providers from entering markets but also keeping poorly performing ones locked inside.
Today, an entrepreneur with a creative idea to better serve learners looking to leverage their education for a better job finds it almost impossible to qualify for and receive meaningful funding via learners’ Pell Grants, student loans, or workforce training dollars from federal programs like the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act. Some providers will even encounter barriers to receiving indirect support (such as serving as a vendor to an eligible provider) thanks to proposals that threaten to regulate so-called “third-party servicers,” which help to deliver online programs and other services to colleges and universities. Conversely, a provider that has been failing learners for decades is now almost impossible to remove from funding eligibility, particularly if it is a nonprofit or public entity. (More on this below.) And increasingly, when learners themselves fail, they are bailed out with ever-greater taxpayer subsidies (such as the current administration’s recent loan-forgiveness efforts), which only serve to perpetuate the failure of incompetent providers that were previously approved.
Although this dynamic has been steadily worsening for decades, regulatory actions from the Biden-Harris administration have exacerbated it, thwarting nearly any potential for substantive, market-driven improvement in favor of misguided efforts at consumer protection. Among other things, it has subsidized a broken college finance system with student loan forgiveness, attacked innovative providers by restricting how they are allowed to operate, and made workforce training more difficult to access through regulations that merely stack new barriers upon already imposing piles. To effectively serve learners, the next generation of federal regulators ought to abandon today’s obsession with trying to bubble wrap them in “protective” regulations and instead embrace a flexible structure that allows anyone to serve learners, with additional funds flowing to only those who succeed.
Perhaps the most conspicuous means by which these changes could be implemented is through the lowering of some of the regulatory barriers that prevent private-sector providers from gaining access to funding streams. The reduction of these barriers would spur performance and innovation by allowing more providers to enter the market and compete with existing powerhouses. Conversely, regulators ought to also implement a system of results-based accountability to ensure that existing providers are continuing to produce positive outcomes. This would lead under-performing providers to lose access to the same funding, further fostering competition.
Both of these changes would prove particularly constructive in certain fields, such as college accreditation, where the entire market is dominated by six legacy accreditors, which, despite consistently failing to ensure positive outcomes, enjoy regional monopolies due to the fact that they’ve been deemed “too big to fail” by the regulators who are ostensibly in charge of holding them accountable. If regulators were to make it easier for such actors to lose their access to federal funds, legacy accreditors would be forced to either keep pace with newer, higher-performing, competitors or risk being pushed out of the playing field altogether.
Actors outside of the federal government can aide efforts to create a more competitive environment in the education and workforce space. A number of recent examples, such as the enduring court battle disputing the legality of the Biden-Harris administration’s student loan forgiveness efforts or state legislation requiring public universities to periodically switch accreditors, have proven that bold and principled pushback can effectively protect against further regulatory creep. Similar responses, particularly if they are backed by considerable popular support or sturdy legal grounding, can be enormously effective tools for signaling disapproval and discouraging regulators from taking further meddlesome actions. Even still, many of these measures are merely temporary fixes, as a clean regulatory state can likely only come from Congress.
In short, all education or training providers should be evaluated on the basis of their ability to produce quality outcomes and provide pathways to jobs rather than their ability (or lack thereof) to navigate mountains of complicated regulations. Granted, no measure gauging the success of outcomes will be without fault, but there are metrics that already exist, such as return on investment, that could easily be used as the basis for a federal system of accountability.
With a new presidential administration inbound, some of the most impactful measures to remedy this system could be instituted rather speedily. Indeed, some will be as simple as federal regulators recognizing new accrediting agencies, granting minimal additional flexibilities in workforce funding streams, and experimenting with accountability regimes that hold colleges accountable over the outcomes they produce. Affordable and accessible paths to good jobs are possible and no doubt worth pursuing. However, success in this arena will not be cheaply earned. It will depend on private actors, state governments, and federal officials who are willing to take action to bring it about.
