Washington has a gift for burying the blade in the boilerplate. While Americans were busy arguing about spending bills and pandemic relief, bureaucrats were quietly rewriting the rules of higher education — not to help students, but to punish the schools that actually prepare people for jobs. The target? Career and vocational colleges. The weapon? A regulation most Americans have never heard of.
It started in 1992 with something called the 85/15 rule — later the 90/10 rule — which required proprietary schools to draw at least 10% of their revenue from non-federal sources. The original intent was reasonable enough: ensure career colleges aren’t just federal-funding mills. But reasonable isn’t really Washington’s thing, is it?
The Obama administration layered on new requirements, demanding schools prove they “prepare students for gainful employment” and expanding pathways for students to seek loan forgiveness if they felt misled. Then came the Biden administration, which took the regulatory ratchet and cranked it until something broke.
A COVID bill with a hidden cost
In 2021, tucked inside the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan — a sprawling COVID-relief package — the Biden White House redefined how GI Bill benefits are counted under the 90/10 rule. Previously, veterans’ education benefits counted toward a school’s non-federal revenue, which made sense. A GI Bill benefit is earned through service, not handed out like a Pell Grant. But the new language reclassified those benefits as federal funds, meaning career schools that enrolled too many veterans risked blowing past the 90% cap and losing eligibility altogether.
Read that again. The Biden administration made it financially dangerous for career colleges to admit the men and women who served this country.
Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana introduced the PARITY Act to repeal the rule entirely, and he’s not alone. A coalition of military organizations backed the bill, arguing it forces schools to limit veteran enrollment — not because of quality concerns, but because of an arbitrary funding formula.
The double standard nobody talks about
So how do traditional universities measure up under this same standard? They don’t — because nobody’s making them. The 90/10 rule applies only to proprietary schools. Public and nonprofit colleges play by entirely different rules. According to the National Defense Committee, if the same standard were applied across all of higher education, 80% of public two-year colleges and 40% of public four-year universities would be out of compliance.
From the Consumer Action for a Strong Economy’s letter of support for 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 argue it closed a “loophole” that let predatory schools target service members as walking dollar signs. That concern isn’t baseless — bad actors exist in every industry. But the answer to a handful of bad schools isn’t a blanket regulation that treats every veteran’s enrollment as a liability.
Let’s be honest about what this is
This was never about protecting veterans. It was about protecting the university cartel — the bloated, tuition-inflating, DEI-saturated institutions that charge you $200,000 so your grandkid can graduate with a degree in social justice and a barista apron. Meanwhile, career schools that teach people to weld, code, and wire buildings get treated like suspects.
President Trump has made supporting the military a cornerstone of his administration. His immediate predecessors? They used veterans as political props while quietly making their education choices harder. The PARITY Act is a chance to finally correct that.
A veteran who earned the GI Bill and chose a trade school made a practical, self-reliant decision — exactly the kind of decision this country used to celebrate. Government has no business punishing the school that said yes.
Key Takeaways
- Biden’s 2021 rule change penalizes career schools for enrolling veterans using GI Bill benefits.
- Sen. Banks’s PARITY Act would repeal the unfair 90/10 rule targeting vocational schools.
- If applied equally, most public colleges would fail the same standard.
- Veterans earned their education benefits — Washington shouldn’t devalue their choices.
Sources: Daily Caller
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