We recently reported that the Obama Administration is poised to release new rules on “for profit” colleges, which were based on ones that a judge declared “arbitrary” and “capricious”.

However, in an opinion piece published by Reuters, Reihan Salam suggests some of the rules may have merit — and should be applied to “non-profit” schools as well (hat-tip, Instapundit).

…The Department of Education plans to identify vocational programs that leave their average graduate paying a high share of their earnings in loan payments (8 percent or more of total earnings, 20 percent or more of discretionary earnings) as well as those with a high average loan default rate (of 30 percent or more). Programs that cross these red lines in two out of three years will lose the right to offer their students federal financial aid.

Curbing the abuses of this sector could do some good. But career training programs represent a small subset of the higher education universe. If we take a somewhat wider view, it seems pretty puzzling that, say, business or engineering majors at four-year colleges and universities aren’t being treated as enrollees in vocational programs.

Why not? Given the epidemic of underemployment among recent college graduates, it might make sense to apply the same standard to all post-secondary institutions, not just those that are explicitly labeled career training colleges.

Steve Gunderson, president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the trade association that represents the for-profit higher education sector, observes in a tart press release that “if the regulation were applied to all of higher education, programs like a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University, a law degree from George Washington University Law School and a bachelor’s degree in social work from Virginia Commonwealth University, would all be penalized.”

My reply to Gunderson would be that, well, yes, let’s penalize these programs too. It makes perfect sense to establish a regulatory floor to protect consumers from the least effective post-secondary programs, whether they’re at vocational schools or standard-issue colleges and universities

..There are two really deep problems that plague U.S. higher education. The first is the absence of useful and reliable data that students and parents can use to evaluate programs of all kinds. In “College Blackout: How the Higher Education Lobby Fought to Keep Students in the Dark,” Amy Laitinen and Clare McCann of the New America Foundation recount how the private nonprofit higher education lobby has fought against efforts to create a federal student unit record system.

…This leads us to the second problem. While transparency would help expose the worst schools, it won’t necessarily improve the average quality of America’s higher education institutions……