Here’s What Commenters Want the Department of Education to Change

The U.S. Department of Education wants feedback about its plans to replace, repeal, or modify existing regulations.

Here are samples of what commenters want to see changed:

A commenter from Maryland wrote that a liberal-arts institution had tried to offer programs for out-of-state students, but that the process was made more difficult by “State Authorization rules,” the federal requirement that colleges get approval from states where they enroll students online.

The rules cost the college time and money to coordinate state agreements, the commenter wrote, going so far as to say, “I would support rescission of this rule.”

A commenter from New York asked the department to exempt from the gainful-employment rules those institutions where the applicable programs are small. The gainful-employment regulations assess career-oriented programs on the basis of graduates’ debt relative to their earnings.

Institutions with few students are not subject to gainful-employment penalties but still must complete time-consuming reports, the commenter wrote: “I simply would like to ask for there to be a blanket exemption from the entirety of the GE rules for schools with fewer than 75 students enrolled in all of their GE programs combined.”

A commenter who identified himself or herself as a “financial-aid administrator” asked the department to simplify Fafsa questions: “Get rid of all the untaxed-income questions and additional financial-information questions. Also get rid of the asset questions.”

For more comments and suggestions on existing regulations, see the comments here.