A U.S. Department of Education regulation stating that a for-profit institution cannot offer a program that has a debt-to-student ration of 8% or more is being challenged by representatives from Kaplan, mostly because a huge number of programs at non-profits and public schools don’t pass the same test.

Spencer Irvine at Accuracy in Academia has the story:

Kaplan University Takes On Obama

The U.S. Department of Education’s latest rule, which mandates that for-profit colleges cannot saddle students with debt at an arbitrary rate, affects only for-profit colleges such as Kaplan, DeVry and University of Phoenix, representatives of Kaplan claimed during a Washington, D.C. briefing recently.

Former Dallas mayor Thomas Leppert, now the CEO of Kaplan, explained how the rule itself is not fair to for-profit colleges. Non-profit and state colleges and universities have similar debt problems for their students and yet are exempt from this rule. “A regulation should apply to any institution,” said Leppert, and noted “it only applies and targets the for-profit sector.” He also pointed out that U.S. courts threw out the rule in 2011. “It says a lot to target just one institution” such as Kaplan, he said. However, the Department of Education will most likely put this rule into effect by November 1^st of this year.

The rule will disband any college program offered by for-profit institutions if the debt-to-student ratio is above 8%. Leppert said the number behind the rule came from the secretive Social Security Administration (SSA), “[it] is not good data,” he argued and alleged that with the SSA, “transparency is bad.” The rule, Leppert said, does not measure the quality of the programs that the administration is targeting and the numbers measure a two-year investment in education, compared to completing a four-year degree. If the rule was fair and was applied equally, public and non-profit colleges would also be forced out of business.

Typically, there is a public comment period on proposed regulatory rules, but the Department of Education managed to keep this one a big secret. Moreover, when more than one student from a university or institution writes a comment to the department, the department now counts all comments from that university as one single comment. Kaplan estimated the rule generated 90,000 public comments, which they said was astonishingly high and unexpected. The administration, lamented Leppert, “may not care if they win or lose in court” over the rule.

A public four-year college, on average, has a 12% debt-to-student ratio, with private non-profits at 13% and for-profits 16%. And, if one applies the rule to the University of Texas, 54% of classes would fail the standard including English, geography, Russian studies, public health education and women’s studies courses.