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Gainful Employment 

Negotiated Rulemaking Committee Meetings 

Opening Remarks of 

Julie Miceli, Deputy General Counsel, U.S. Department of Education 

December 13, 2013 

1. Good morning. I am Julie Miceli, Deputy General Counsel at the U.S. 

Department of Education. Deputy Under Secretary Jeff Appel was not 

able to be with us this morning, so he has asked me to welcome the 

Committee back for the third and final round of negotiated rulemaking 

on gainful employment. 

2. Welcome also to members of the public. 

3. I want to start by first acknowledging how incredibly fruitful these 

negotiating sessions have been. We received constructive feedback 

from this Committee on our draft proposals, we heard novel ideas that 

we have taken back to consider as a team, and we have learned more 

about the concerns of the communities each of the negotiators 

represent. 

4. We have made improvements to the proposed rule in response to your 

comments throughout this process. All told, the robust discussions and 

debates at this table have been thoughtful, thorough, and extremely 

valuable to the Secretary and the Department staff working on the 

proposed rule. 

5. It is clear that this Committee has put a lot into this to effort. Secretary 

Duncan extends his sincere appreciation to each of the negotiators for 

your commitment to this issue, your care in preparing for each session, 

and your dedication to the negotiated rulemaking process. 
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6. At the last session, we heard the request of Committee members for 

additional time to consider the proposed rule and the forthcoming data. 

In response, the Department was pleased to host this third negotiating 

session. 

7. Since the last session, the Department has worked to revise the draft 

regulatory text to reflect the decisions the Department made based on 

the Committee members’ proposals. We have also revised parts of the 

regulatory text to add clarity to the few remaining sections that the 

Committee did not get through at the last session. 

8. And our data analysts have worked tirelessly to produce data that the 

Committee could reference in your discussions on the non-completer 

metric today. 

9. I want to extend an apology to the Committee that the materials for 

today’s session were only sent to you on Wednesday evening. We 

know that you have all put a lot of effort into being prepared for each 

session and that this was a shorter window to review the materials 

before this session. 

10. Please know that we have been working very hard to carefully consider 

all of the input we received from the Committee at the last session, and 

to make sure that the draft rule and the data you have before you today 

is as precise and useful as possible. 

11. Today, the Committee is charged with finishing its review of the 

proposed rule, and going through each component for the purpose of 

reaching consensus on the proposed package. 

12. We recognize that there are diverse interests and perspectives at the 

table and that reconciling these views will be challenging. But we 

remain optimistic that the Committee is working to develop a rule that 
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accomplishes the Department’s policy goals in a balanced, reasonable 

and practical manner. 

13. As we have said previously, we are looking for a rule that satisfies our 

key policy goals: 

(1) Define what it means for a program to prepare a student for 

gainful employment in a recognized occupation; 

(2) Develop measures to evaluate the extent to which programs 

meet this requirement and construct an accountability system 

that distinguishes between programs that do and do not meet it; 

(3) Protect students and taxpayers by identifying GE programs 

with poor student outcomes and ending taxpayer support of 

programs that do not prepare students as required; and 

(4) Support students in deciding where to pursue education and 

training by increasing transparency about the costs and 

outcomes of GE programs. 

14. To further these goals, the Department has made a few changes to the 

proposed rule from the last version. John Kolotos is going to walk 

through these today in more detail, but I would like to take a minute to 

highlight a few of the key changes. 

15. First, we removed in this proposal the part of the Program Cohort 

Default Rate metric that would make programs ineligible if their 

default rates are above 40% in the first year. 

16. For most of this rule, we have taken the approach that programs 

should be allowed the opportunity and time to improve, but this 

provision would have not allowed for that improvement time. 
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17. We understand that a default rate of 40% or more is high, but in 

keeping with the general spirit and policy approach for the rule, under 

this proposal, programs will now have 3 years to improve their default 

rates before they face ineligibility under this metric. 

18. Additionally, we removed the Loan Portfolio Repayment metric from 

this proposal. 

19. This metric was introduced for the purpose of gauging interest and 

receiving feedback at the table. But after hearing from the Committee, 

we felt that having one measure for completers and one that included 

non-completers, rather than two, was preferred, and that a Program 

level CDR metric was more in line with our broader policy goals. 

20. And while we believe that repayment rates provide valuable 

information for students and prospective students and are including a 

borrower-based repayment rate in our required disclosures, we only 

had limited data available to help us analyze the loan portfolio 

performance as a metric. As a result, we could not draw policy 

conclusions about the stability of the metric over multiple years, and 

did not feel we had the information we needed to keep this metric in 

this proposal. 

21. Finally, we thank the Committee members for submitting proposals on 

how the Department could structure the rules to account for schools 

with very low default rates or situations where few students borrow. 

22. Although we believe these proposals address valid concerns, they are 

not included in the draft rule before you today. There is a high bar for 

including any provisions in the rules. We do not feel this was met in 

this case. 
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23. I know everyone is anxious to get started, so I will close by saying that 

on behalf of Secretary Duncan, I thank the Committee for your time 

and for lending your expertise to this very important process. 

24. Thank you.