Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 52
AMERICA'S BEST AND
WORST COLLEGES
FOR VOCATIONAL
CERTIFICATES
Finally, a ranking of the programs where
millions of Americans seek job skills.
By Paul Glastris
I
n January 2017, as it was preparing to exit Washington,
the Obama administration left a little parting gift for the
higher education community. It was a list of nearly 800
vocational programs, almost all of them at for-profit colleges,
where graduates earned so little, or had to borrow so much,
that they couldn't pay off their student loans.
The list was part of the Department of Education's new
" gainful employment " regulation, a years-in-the-making effort
to set minimal standards for career training programs
in areas like auto repair and dental assistant. The Washington
Monthly used the regulation's underlying data to create
a first-of-its-kind ranking of the Best and Worst Colleges for
Vocational Certificates in 2018.
Under the gainful employment rule, the worst-performing
programs were supposed to lose eligibility to receive federal
student aid. That didn't happen, because the Trump administration
eventually repealed the regulation, claiming
that it unfairly targeted for-profit schools.
But a funny thing did happen. Even though the federal
funds weren't cut off, within two years 500 of the 800 failing
programs had been shut down or reformed by the 136 colleges
that ran them, according to a study by New America, a Washington,
D.C., think tank. Indeed, some of the biggest colleges
in the for-profit game, such as the Education Corporation of
America, with its 70 campuses nationwide, closed their doors
entirely. It turns out that being " named and shamed " was
enough to convince many vocational college administrators
to clean up their act-or for investors to pull the plug.
During the Trump years, there was very little effective
federal scrutiny of the bad-actor trade schools that
52 September/October 2022
remained. That's a shame, because every year countless
students-disproportionately military veterans and lowincome
people of color-get recruited into poor-quality career
training programs that load them up with debt without
teaching them marketable skills. At the same time, there
are better-run certificate programs out there that lead to
well-paying jobs-and there is rare bipartisan agreement in
Washington that more should be done to help people access
such training.
This past March, Joe Biden's Department of Education
unveiled a proposed new version of the gainful employment
rule. It features more robust metrics and, to address conservative
critics, covers a wider variety of public and nonprofit
programs. Unfortunately, because it takes time to go
through the rule-making process and accumulate the necessary
data-and because the Education Department is understaffed
and overwhelmed by other tasks, like student
loan reform-the final regulation won't come out until
2024, and a new list of failing schools won't be released until
2027, at the earliest.
The editors of the Monthly think that's too long to wait.
That's why we've put together the 2022 Best and Worst Colleges
for Vocational Certificates rankings, using Education
Department data similar to what the department itself will
draw on for its gainful employment calculations. We selected
the 10 most common undergraduate certificate programs,
like medical assistant, cosmetology, and HVAC (heating, ventilation,
and air conditioning) maintenance, then ranked the
colleges that offer them by the median earnings of their students
one year after graduation-which was 2019, the most
Washington Monthly - September/October 2022
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