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Tomorrow, the new Department of Education (ED) institutional accountability rules become official. For the first time, the federal government is putting a broad program-level earnings test at the center of Title IV eligibility—broad as in for nearly all academic programs. The unofficial final rules came out yesterday, which covers all of the substance, but the formatting and page / footnote numbering will change tomorrow with the official version.

I have covered the reality of Earnings Premium measurements and the details of the accountability concept, and it is time to take stock of what has changed and what hasn’t with this week’s release.

The primary changes from the public comment period (i.e., the new information in yesterday's draft) are primarily about schedules. In essence the effective date has been pushed back, but not by a single amount and not for everyone at once. There are really three dates to track.

Hence "pushed back one to two years" is accurate, as long as you understand that it is really three different dates.

To see why those dates land where they do, it helps to walk through how this metric travels from program completion to a consequence. The cadence runs in six steps:

None of this is current; the metric is always looking several years into the past.

For most programs, with a July 1, 2027 effective date, the first dataset produced under the new rule will not publish until February 2028. That one-year delay matters because the rule is built on six-digit Classification of Instruction Codes (CIP6), while every dataset we can see today—College Scorecard, PPD2026—is four-digit (CIP4). Think of CIP6 as where students actually get degrees or certificates, such as Occupational Therapist Assistant or Radiologist Assistant, whereas CIP4 is the broader grouping of Allied Health and Medical Assisting Services.

That means we have a strange transition year ahead. The rule is real, the legal framework is arriving, but institutions being held accountable still will not be able to see the program-level CIP6 results that matter most. We will be blind for an additional year on what the CIP6 framework actually does to specific programs.

The tipped occupations are a special case, because the data and the consequences now run on different starting calendars. The earnings data for these tipped programs will first be reported in the February 2028 dataset, but the first determination that can actually impact one of these programs will occur July 1, 2029 (the two-year delay).

There were some other adjustments in the final rules highlighted by ED that narrow rather than expand the rules, including appeals schedules and loan eligibility exemptions.

In a nutshell, the final rule is official tomorrow, but with one-to-two-year delays from what has been discussed for the past year.

Everything else. Every flaw I have described in the Earnings Premium is now a fact of life (and, I am sure, the subject of future lawsuits). There were no changes to the underlying concept: earnings measured four years after completion, compared against survey-based aggregations that stand in for an earnings threshold (the median earnings of 25-34-year-olds with only a high school diploma for undergraduate programs, and a more complex bachelor's-earnings formula for graduate programs). Commenters pressed on the age band, the four-year window, and the elimination of the debt-to-earnings test, and ED held its position on all of them. Undergraduate certificates, which the statute never named, remain in the final rules.

My own public comment, which focused on ED’s analysis of gender-impact concerns, was rejected essentially in full. ED repeated the same basic footnote, still without publishing the regression details needed to evaluate the claim, and still using a field-of-study control that removes much of the disparity negotiators were concerned about. In ED’s own published data, removing that control changes the estimated gap from roughly zero to about $12,000 per year. I’ll return to that issue separately, but the short version is that ED chose not to add transparency.

I'm glad ED recognized that an effective date two days after the first view of the final rule text would have been foolish. Colleges and universities have a one-to-two-year reprieve, depending on the program.

Most institutions aren't prepared to evaluate their programs at a strategic level, and that's the real shift. By strategic I mean that program review can no longer be delegated down to the deans and the colleges as a routine academic exercise. Once a program's earnings outcomes can cost it access to federal loans—and with that its enrollment and its revenue—the question stops being academic and becomes one of institutional risk that belongs with presidents and boards. This is a new era of institutional risk, and most institutions' governance hasn't caught up to it.

We've seen a preview of this in the state-level reviews of program viability, where systems and legislatures have started pruning programs on enrollment and break-even finances. The earnings rule extends that same logic to every institution that touches Title IV federal aid (loans and Pell Grants alike), on a federal, ROI-based measure that no campus controls. Whatever an institution thinks of the metric, it now has to plan around it.

The institutions that are best prepared will not be the ones waiting for ED’s first CIP6 dataset in 2028. They will be the ones using their own student records now to understand which programs are exposed, which ones are safe, and where governance needs to change before the first determinations arrive.

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