The U.S. Department of Education is delaying the reporting deadline for the gainful employment and financial value transparency regulations from Oct. 1 to Jan. 15, agency officials said Friday.
In its announcement, the department said the new timeline will ensure colleges can “prioritize critical activities that might still remain” from the rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The revamped FAFSA form was intended to ease completion, but its debut was marred by frequent delays and technical glitches.
Additionally, the reporting deadline extension will give colleges more time to prepare for the release of the FAFSA form for the 2025-26 academic year. The Education Department expects that form to be fully available by Dec. 1.
The agency’s Federal Student Aid office “is also working through a lot of workload challenges, and they are prioritized on launching next year’s FAFSA on time, and also making sure that we’re implementing the gainful employment and financial value transparency rules as smoothly as possible,” U.S. Under Secretary for Education James Kvaal, the agency’s top higher education official, told Higher Ed Dive in an interview Friday. “Those are the reasons we have made this change.”
The move comes after prominent lawmakers and industry experts this week called for the Education Department to push back the reporting deadline, arguing that colleges didn’t have enough time to gather and report the required information amid the botched rollout of the FAFSA. The agency said it had heard similar feedback from colleges, which also said a delay would help them prioritize FAFSA work.
This marks the second time the Education Department has moved back the deadline. The first delay, announced in March, pushed the reporting due date from July 31 to Oct. 1.
The Education Department released the final gainful employment and financial value transparency regulations last September.
The gainful employment rule requires career training programs to pass a debt-to-earnings measure to prove graduates make enough to pay off their federal student loans, and that at least half of them outearn typical workers in their state who have only a high school diploma. Nearly all programs at for-profit colleges, as well as certificate programs at nonprofit institutions, are subject to the rule.
If they fail those tests, they risk losing access to Title IV federal financial aid. Under the gainful employment rule, 2026 will be the first year a program could become ineligible for aid.
The financial value transparency rule has a broader impact, though it doesn’t come with the same threat of being cut off from Title IV aid. It requires all colleges to provide student and financial information about their programs to the Education Department.
The Education Department will then use that information — including student debt burdens and program costs — to post data to a consumer-facing website aimed at helping students make informed decisions about where to attend college.
Starting in 2026, if applicants are interested in certificate and graduate programs known to leave students with high debt burdens, they will have to acknowledge seeing that information before they can enroll.
While the Education Department’s extension pushes the reporting deadline nearly six months past the original date, it’s still not as late as some lawmakers had hoped. On Tuesday, 20 senators urged U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to push the date to July 2025.
But Kvaal said officials believe the information is key for “students and families making college choices.”
“Jan. 15, we hope, will allow us to produce the data this spring and inform college choices for next year,” he added.
In its Friday announcement, the Education Department noted that some colleges may want to report their information sooner, and said the agency would allow some institutions to opt into doing so this fall.
“We will have an opportunity for a limited number of schools to report their information and get their results on a faster timeline,” Kvaal said, adding that the agency would have more information about this effort soon.
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