A delay on gainful employment, but a commitment to move forward

The Education Department announced yesterday that it was going to delay issuance of some of its gainful employment rules in order to examine more closely some of the 83,000 comments submitted.  At the same time it announced that it was still planning on releasing the rest of the rules on November 1, as it had originally planned.

As I wrote in my last post, the for-profit sector had kept the pressure on even after the comment period on the rules was over.  In an apparent attempt to improve its image and perhaps sound more like the other sectors of the higher education industry, the Career College Association has just changed its name to the Association of Private-Sector Colleges and Universities, or APSCU, an acronym uncomfortably close to that of AASCU, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Or, as APSCU states on its website, ""CCA is changing because there comes a time when only change can get you where you need to be."  I have no idea what that means.  The new tagline for the organization is prominently displayed on its homepage:

The notion of providing options to students has been at the crux of the organization's argument against the Department of Education tightening regulations.on the industry.  "Committed to putting students first" seems rather facetious given that these are all for-profit companies, and their primary responsibility is to their shareholders, not their customers.

One of the interesting tidbits in the Chronicle of Higher Education's article about the delay was the revelation that Corinthian Colleges, Inc., the company that started the "My Career Counts" public relations campaign I wrote about in my last post, is spending in the "high seven figures" on the campaign.  Probably money well spent if Corinthian and APSCU is successful in getting the gainful employment rules delayed, or better yet for them, significantly weakened.