President Joe Biden made several 2020 campaign promises to improve higher education and reduce its financial burden on students. Among them was a promise to stop for-profit education programs from profiteering off their pupils.

To do so, the campaign said, "The Biden Administration will require for-profits to first prove their value to the U.S. Department of Education before gaining eligibility for federal aid."

Biden's administration in October 2023 released rules to make for-profit schools and career programs meet minimum standards and disclose the risks and rewards of taking out student loans.

Biden established what he called the "gainful employment program accountability" and "financial value transparency" frameworks. 

The Education Department would use two measures to assess whether programs at all types of colleges meet requirements for what it refers to as "gainful employment." 

• A debt-to-earnings ratio. The share of yearly earnings graduates would need to pay their student loan debt must be equal to or less than 8%, or less than or equal to 20% of their discretionary earnings (annual earnings minus 150% of the federal poverty guideline.) The earnings are based on IRS data about graduates who received Title IV federal aid.

• Graduate earnings. At least half of a college or program's graduates in a given state would have to outearn typical high school graduates who have no postsecondary education.

Programs that don't meet the standards on the same metric twice in a three-year period are ineligible for federal student aid. 

Former President Barack Obama wrote a rule similar to Biden's in 2014, which then-President Donald Trump rescinded in 2019. Trump has a history with for-profit programs; his business organization once owned Trump University, a now-defunct for-profit series of real estate courses that in 2018 agreed to pay $25 million to settle student-brought lawsuits.

The Biden administration's financial value transparency framework would require programs to provide the Education Department information about the value of their degrees or certificates to students, such as how much debt they may face and how much they are likely to earn after completion of the program. That information would be then available to students on a federal website.

The Education Department, in an October 2023 press release announcing the new rules, estimated the change would protect 700,000 students annually who would have otherwise enrolled in a low-performing program.

The Biden rules were twice delayed. They were to start in July 2024, but reporting deadlines for schools won't take effect until Jan. 15, less than a week before Biden leaves office.

The delay was related to a second delay caused by setbacks and technical glitches in the rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA, experts said.

"This timeline means that, while schools will have reported the necessary data to the department by the end of the administration, the agency won't be able to calculate the GE and FVT metrics until later in 2025, delaying students' ability to use the information to make choices about which programs to enroll in," said Stephanie Riegg Cellini, a George Washington University public policy and economics professor.

Nevertheless, Riegg Cellini said the two rules fulfill Biden's promise. The gainful employment provision requires all career-training programs to meet minimum standards for value to qualify for federal student aid programs, she said.

"Specifically, programs that have unaffordable levels of debt relative to their earnings, or that leave graduates with wages below those of the average high school graduate in the state, would be required to disclose that they failed federal standards," Riegg Cellini said.

The financial value transparency rules go further, calculating the metrics for all programs across all types of institutions, she said. 

"The (financial value transparency) rules generate unprecedented transparency for students into the outcomes of their programs," Riegg Cellini said.

Other experts PolitiFact spoke with praised Biden's progress toward fulfilling this promise.

Kyle Southern is the associate vice president of higher education quality at the Institute for College Access & Success, a group that says it advocates for "affordability, accountability and equity in higher education." He said Biden's "gainful employment and financial value transparency framework proposals — along with other regulatory efforts that went through extensive negotiated rulemaking and public comment processes — collectively represented the strongest effort to date to protect students against high-cost, low-quality programs and programs relying on predatory recruitment and misleading enrollment practices."

Research has raised concerns about the limited value of for-profit programs and the high debt and default rates they generate, said Harry Holzer, a Georgetown University public policy professor. Biden's rules "unquestionably moved us in the right direction," he said.

"The Biden rules established reasonable criteria to make sure these credentials have value and limit debt/defaults, and are not just limited to for-profit colleges," Holzer said.

Robert Shand, an American University assistant education professor, said the new rules go a long way toward achieving Biden's goal, "though, as is typical of campaign language, the rhetoric here is a bit loftier than reality."

Shand said the rules changes are more of a pathway for for-profit schools to lose access if they persistently underperform.

The gainful employment requirements "fairly stringent," he said, but the earnings test (at least half of graduates earning more than the average high school graduate) "does not strike me as a terribly high bar."

Shand said it's unclear how much effect the gainful employment rule will have. For-profit colleges and certificate programs rely on federal aid heavily, and the threat of losing it is real, Shand said, but the rules' novelty makes forecasting their effects hard.  

It's also unclear whether the rules will survive Trump's new administration.

They "will likely be on the chopping block under Linda McMahon's coming Department of Education," Holzer said. Trump tapped McMahon, the World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder and former Small Business Administration administrator, to be education secretary. 

Southern shared Holzer's concern for the rules' future, given Trump's past opposition and pending legislation in Congress, such as the College Cost Reduction Act. Southern said the act, if passed, would remove gainful employment and other student protections.

"If past performance is an indicator of future intention, these protections face significant challenges ahead, whether via regulatory processes, legislation, or in the courts," Southern said.

Shand said he knows of no official statement from Trump's transition team on the topic. Nevertheless, Shand said he expects Trump to rescind the rules and rely on financial transparency and information, rather than stronger regulation, to hold for-profit schools accountable. 

Riegg Cellini sounded a more optimistic note, saying the rules Obama wrote that Trump rescinded didn't cover all colleges and sectors, a key critique of those rules, but Biden's rules do. She cited legislation proposed by congressional Republicans. She said the College Cost Reduction Act, though it would eliminate gainful employment regulations, would codify the gainful employment and financial value transparency data. Another bill, the Lowering Education Costs and Debt Act, would establish a similar accountability structure for colleges.

"These proposals suggest that the 2023 (gainful employment and financial value transparency) rules may be much more closely aligned with the goals of the Trump Administration and the Republican party this time around," Riegg Cellini said. 

It's too soon to know whether the new rules Biden established will fulfill his campaign promise because a deadline for reporting data from for-profit colleges and programs was delayed until shortly before Biden leaves office. It's also unclear whether Trump will keep the rules. But because Biden established them and they are scheduled to take effect before he leaves office, we rate it as a Promise Kept.

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