Barely passing
Washington is ditching the job of patrolling abusive forprofit colleges, dropping a key rule aimed at curbing student debt and farfetched job promises. Given a chance to plug this gap, Sacramento is stepping in with a halfhearted remedy.
A package of reform measures won approval this week from a state Senate panel headed by Orinda Democrat Steve Glazer. But that didn’t happen without significant changes that weaken the goal of reining in a wayward industry.
Forprofit colleges sometimes can serve an educational world in valuable ways, teaching job skills and offering training for second careers. But the tuition costs don’t often match the lowpaying slots that graduates eventually face, leaving them buried in debt. These students, often lowincome and minority, are classroom victims.
The key Sacramento bill, AB1340 by San Francisco Assemblyman David Chiu, a Democrat, sought a socalled gainful employment yardstick that would limit enrollments if lofty job prospects didn’t pan out. Enforcement would be handled by a state agency. The bill largely matched Obamaera regulations that Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, repealed last week. Instead of policing forprofits, she’s proposing a vague standard of transparency that calls for a scorecard giving information on student debt and job leads.
That abdication should have revved up California’s chances to go its own way. But Glazer’s committee balked, saying the bill was too complicated and hard to administer by Sacramento. The designated state agency, the Bureau of
PostSecondary Education, wasn’t up to the task despite arguments that it was time to upgrade its oversight work, not ignore the job.
The bill was watered down to measure performance more simply: Data would compare general salaries expected in a vocational job category against overall debt. Chiu, the bill’s author, accepted the change.
Dropped entirely was another bill, AB1343, to limit federal and state funds that forprofits can tap for veterans going back to school. It was likewise knocked as too unwieldy to work, but no alternative plan to regulate this corner of the industry was put forward. Vets will have to wait for the protection they need from aggressive colleges that promise much and deliver little.
California, in the end, is devising basic safeguards shredded by the Trump team. But it could be doing a much better job in coming up with fuller protections. The state Senate committee ducked a chance at comprehensive solutions that are needed.