Friday Follow Up
A milestone moment for institutional accountability, with hard questions still ahead
Phil Hill
January 09, 2026
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The Department of Education’s (ED) negotiated rulemaking (NegReg) panel has reached consensus on institutional accountability. That alone makes this week notable.
For readers who don’t live and breathe NegReg: negotiated rulemaking is ED’s formal process for writing higher-ed regulations, with representatives from institutions, states, advocates, accreditors, and others around the table. Consensus means every constituency agrees on, or at least is willing to support, the regulatory package, allowing ED to move forward without a fractured record or competing proposals for a formal set of draft rules. That outcome is rare. Since the fall, ED has reached consensus in three NegReg sessions, compared with just one consensus outcome over the previous decade. I, along with many observers, thought this result was unlikely as late as last night.
Given the political stakes and the substance at issue - earnings tests, ROI-based accountability, and eligibility for federal aid - that’s remarkable.
It also signals something important: earnings-based accountability is no longer a speculative policy direction. It is becoming operational.
The big picture: ROI accountability is moving forward
What makes this consensus especially significant is how different this moment is from the last major accountability push.
Historically, federal accountability was targeted. Gainful Employment was aimed squarely at for-profit and vocational programs, built as a compliance regime for a subset of institutions that policymakers believed posed outsized risk to students and taxpayers. The rest of higher education largely sat outside those rules, governed instead by accreditation and eligibility standards that assumed institutional good faith.
That era is ending.
