GE/FVT (STATS/Earnings Accountability) History
Gainful Employment Background and History
The Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, as amended, defines institutions of higher education, proprietary institutions of higher education, and postsecondary vocational institutions in part as those that prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation. Between 2011 and 2025, the Department of Education (ED) made multiple attempts to design regulations that would measure whether these schools’ programs led to gainful employment, to ensure that the requirements of the HEA are satisfied. While the details of these attempts varied, they all designed one or more metrics to compare the financial outcomes of students who had enrolled in and/or completed a program of study against a benchmark. Programs whose students did not meet the benchmark could lose eligibility to participate in the HEA Title IV student aid programs.
ED’s first attempt was in 2009 under President Obama. The goal of this regulatory exercise was to address what the administration saw as growing concerns over unaffordable debt levels among students who enrolled in postsecondary programs that purported to prepare students for gainful employment. ED intended to address these concerns by developing measures to determine whether the amount of debt a student incurred was reasonable based on their earnings.
The committee failed to reach consensus, leaving ED to develop final rules on their own. Final rules were published in two separate Federal Register notices on October 29, 2010 for a subset of the topics negotiated— one for approval of new programs and the other for reporting and disclosure requirements for programs that prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation. The effective date of these provisions was July 1, 2011.
Subsequent final rules on the remaining topic of eligibility of gainful employment programs to participate in the Title IV student aid programs were published on June 13, 2011, with an effective date of July 1, 2012. The rules provided a definition for programs that provide training leading to gainful employment in a recognized occupation. They also applied two tests to programs meeting that definition, one based on debt-to-income ratios and the other on repayment rates, to assess whether a program of study led to gainful employment and, consequently, whether the program would continue to be eligible to participate in the federal student aid programs. Both metrics were invalided by a federal court, leaving ED unable to enforce the rule.
In 2013, the Department announced its intention to convene a new negotiated rulemaking committee to tackle gainful employment once again. Those sessions took place in the fall of 2013, concluding again without consensus. ED published final rules in 2014 with an effective date of July 1, 2015. The 2015 rules were similar to the 2011 regulations (which were largely vacated by court order in a 2012 ruling before the rules became effective), but they lacked a repayment rate metric, relying solely on a debt-to-income ratio to establish program eligibility.
Before the 2015 rules became effective, ED announced in June, 2017 its intention to negotiate gainful employment yet again. For the third time, negotiators failed to reach consensus, leaving ED to develop regulations as it saw fit. ED's draft language shared during negotiations included sweeping changes to the gainful employment regulations, including applying those rules to all programs at all institutions rather than limiting to non degree programs and programs offered by proprietary institutions. However, ED ultimately decided instead to rescind the gainful employment rules entirely on July 1, 2019, effective July 1, 2020 but with the option for institutions to implement as early as July 1, 2019.
ED announced its fourth notice of intent to establish a negotiated rulemaking committee for Gainful Employment on May 26, 2021. Three negotiation sessions were held during January through March of 2022, concluding without consensus.
ED published final rules on October 10, 2023, with implementation set for July 1, 2024. This set of regulations expanded the gainful employment regulations by adding a financial value transparency framework that would apply GE metrics and reporting requirements to non-GE programs for disclosure-only purposes.
In July, 2025, president Donald Trump signed the OBBBA into law, codifying for the first time into the HEA a framework for holding institutions responsible for their graduates’ earnings. In January, 2026, the Accountability in Higher Education and Access through Demand-driven Workforce Pell (AHEAD) negotiated rulemaking committee reached consensus on a proposal from the Department of Education to incorporate the new "ineligibility based on low earnings" accountability metric from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into the GE/FVT regulations. Final rules, renamed from Gainful Employment and Financial Value Transparency to the “Student Tuition and Transparency System (STATS) and Earnings Accountability” were issued on July 1, 2026.
Publication Date: 9/1/2026