Public Comments on Upcoming Regulations to Implement OBBBA

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The recent passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) represents a significant statutory shift in federal higher education policy, and in my opinion the biggest structural change will come from two interrelated topics - institutional accountability (aka Do No Harm / Earnings Premium) and new student loan limits. This legislation introduces new frameworks that will reshape how postsecondary programs are evaluated and how graduate education is financed, with a new focus on evaluating programs in public. Institutional accountability in reality means program accountability impacting institutions, as the changes are defined by program, the data reporting is by program, but the financial impact will hit the institution.

The Department of Education (ED) is now preparing to define the regulations and guidance required to implement the OBBBA provisions, and the first step was gathering public comments. Thanks to my research assistants ChatGPT and NotebookLM, I have pulled together all 1,124 public comments (including the text from PDF attachments) into this summary (you can find my initial analysis in this post). You can think of this as AI-enabled crowdsourcing of what ED should consider in its rulemaking, and this should provide a guide on the topics to be covered in negotiated rulemaking (aka negreg).

I will focus on the key legislative changes, analyze major themes from public commentary, and summarize the feasible regulatory pathways available to ED during implementation. I cannot cover the full set of topics in one newsletter post, and the focus of this post is on institutional accountability (aka Do No Harm / Earnings Premium) and new student loan limits.

This is a fairly dense, wonky piece, so it’s probably useful to include a summary of the key points up front.

1. Unless ED makes strong changes and doesn’t just follow OBBBA as written, this means that institutions will have to collect two sets of data. One for the Financial Value Transparency & Gainful Employment (FVT & GE), and another for OBBBA’s Do No Harm provisions.

2. If an academic program fails the new Do No Harm provisions for two out of three years, students enrolling in those programs will not have access to federal financial aid, and in many cases this will mean that the institution will have to stop offering that program.

3. If the definition of what is a Professional degree is not changed, then many quasi-professional master’s degree programs (e.g., psychology, nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and social work) will have loan limits significantly below the cost of degree, likely leading to much lower enrollments.

4. In the end, these changes will lead to a much greater focus in public of the graduate outcomes at the program level.

Table of Contents

• Mind Map of Topics

• Institutional Accountability Changes

• Student Loan Limit Changes

• Combined Top Asks

• Feasibility of Improvements

Mind Map of Topics

First up is a visual mind map organizing the topics covered in the public comments, expanding on the accountability and oversight.

Institutional Accountability Changes

A central pillar of OBBBA is the creation of a new, expansive institutional accountability system, referred to in the statute as the "Do No Harm" approach. This framework replaces prior models with a single, earnings-based metric applied to nearly all postsecondary degree programs, fundamentally altering the federal government's role in assessing institutional performance.

The law extends a modified version of the Gainful Employment (GE) regulation's Earnings Premium (EP) metric (exclusively relying on that metric) nearly all degree programs at all colleges and universities. Under the statute, any program that fails this test for two out of three consecutive years will lose its eligibility to participate in federal financial aid programs. Crucially, while OBBBA excludes undergraduate certificate programs from this new rule, it does not rescind the original GE regulations. This means that those certificate programs—a primary target of the original GE rule—remain subject to the existing GE framework of debt-to-earnings and earnings premium tests.

Comment Counts

• Volume: 648 comments (~57% of all comments mention this topic).

• Who’s commenting (top shares): Student 21.1% (112), Institution of Higher Education 11.5% (61), Institutional & Loan Servicers 10.9% (58), Individual 10.2% (54), Association/Organization 8.5% (45), Financial Aid Administrator 6.6% (35).

• Tone (heuristic): Oppose/concern 47.5% (308), Support 22.8% (148), Unclear 21.1% (137), Recommend changes 8.5% (55).

Student Loan Limit Changes

OBBBA fundamentally alters the financing of post-baccalaureate education by eliminating the Grad PLUS loan program and imposing new, tiered borrowing limits. These statutory changes have generated significant debate among students, institutions, and professional organizations over access to essential professions and the regulatory definition of professional education itself.

For undergraduate students, the limits are largely kept in place, although there are new caps on Parent PLUS loans. At the graduate level, the law eliminates the Grad PLUS loan program for all new borrowers. In its place, it establishes new aggregate borrowing limits of $100,000 for graduate students and $200,000 for professional students. The statute includes an interim "grandfather" provision intended to protect currently enrolled students from immediate disruption, but the specific interpretation of this clause—particularly what it means to be "enrolled in a program"—has become a key point of contention for regulators to resolve.

Comment Counts

• Volume: 624 comments matched (~56% of all comments mention this topic).

• Who’s commenting (top shares): Student 18.5% (96), Institution of Higher Education 14.2% (74), Individual 10.4% (54), Institutional & Loan Servicers 10.0% (52), Financial Aid Administrator 8.7% (45), Association/Organization 7.7% (40).

• Tone (heuristic): Oppose/concern 44.7% (279), Support 22.9% (143), Recommend changes 7.4% (46), Unclear 25.0% (156) (624 total).

Combined Top Asks

Here’s a combined Top Asks list across both topics (Broadened Institutional Accountability / Do-No-Harm and Student Loan Limits & PLUS). I only call out categories of commenters when it truly matters (particularly for Think Tanks or Financial Aid Administrators / FAAs).

1. Program-type allowances / exclusions
   Commenters want rules and caps that reflect credential realities (e.g., clinical hours, licensure lags, professional programs) rather than one-size-fits-all dollar lines or outcome screens. This shows up in both topics: differentiated degree-type caps for loan limits and tailored treatment of fields/levels for accountability. (Frequently raised by FAAs and Think Tanks alike.)

2. Geographic / demographic adjustments (or explicit context)
   Because wages and costs vary by region (urban/rural, distressed areas), commenters argue that unadjusted earnings comparators and uniform caps can misread value and access. Even where statute fixes the benchmark, they ask ED to add COLI/wage-index context to determinations and to recognize regional costs in packaging decisions. (FAAs emphasize this strongly.)

3. Clarify definitions & decision rules
   Requests center on crisp, operational guidance: state vs. national comparator triggers, residency tests for online/multi-state programs, field-of-study granularity (CIP level and roll-ups), and for loan limits, degree-type tiers, proration, stacked credentials, and consortium arrangements. Clear definitions reduce error, disputes, and uneven enforcement.

4. Administrative burden & data/reporting alignment
   Stakeholders ask for one authoritative calendar, stable schemas, and tooling that reuses existing systems (e.g., COD/NSLDS) to avoid duplicate uploads and mid-year rework. The goal is to make compliance a byproduct of normal operations, not a parallel paperwork track—especially for smaller schools.

5. Definition of Professional

   A widespread and coordinated effort emerged from dozens of professional organizations seeking to influence the regulatory definition of a "professional program." Associations representing fields such as psychology, nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and social work argued that their programs squarely meet the existing federal definition (34 CFR § 668.2). They contend that their programs require a level of skill beyond a bachelor's degree and lead to mandatory state licensure, which are the core criteria in the regulation. Their central demand is for the Department to explicitly include their fields in the "professional" category, thereby allowing their students to qualify for the higher $200,000 aggregate borrowing limit.

6. Exemptions / safe harbors & small-cohort safeguards
   Commenters want narrow, time-bound relief for edge cases: tiny cohorts, suppressed cells, new or restructured programs, and documented data anomalies. This is framed as avoiding penalties driven by statistical noise or transitional bookkeeping rather than persistent underperformance.

7. Risk-sharing mechanics & caps (predictable liability)
   Particularly from Think Tanks, there’s support for accountability but with a downside cap - in other words, find a mechanism so that institutions serving low-income students get more of a slap on the wrist instead of a death penalty. Predictable assessment windows and clear cap schedules are seen as aligning incentives without open-ended risk.

8. Phase-in / glide paths
   To prevent cliff effects—whether introducing earnings screens or tightening loan caps—commenters ask for multi-term pilots, staged thresholds, or award-year-based timelines. This gives institutions time to adjust pricing, IT, counseling, and aid packaging.

9. Earnings measure / data-source transparency & appeals
   For accountability metrics, commenters want plain-language documentation of data sources (e.g., Census/ACS vs. IRS/SSA/Scorecard), linkage/cleaning rules, and the covered period/“2-of-3” mechanics—plus a robust, time-boxed appeals path for data errors. Transparency is treated as essential for replicability and trust.

10. Student protections (teach-out / continuity)
    If programs are flagged or borrowing power changes (e.g., PLUS elimination), commenters ask for clear teach-out and continuity plans to protect in-flight students from stranded credits or unexpected financing gaps.

11. Affordability guardrails to avoid private-loan displacement
    With tighter caps or the removal of PLUS pathways, commenters warn about shift to higher-cost private credit and reduced access—especially in graduate/professional programs. They ask for exception pathways or targeted adjustments so limits curb over-borrowing without creating inequitable financing cliffs.

Feasibility of Improvements

It is critical to understand that ED’s hands are tied in many details. The OBBBA law stipulates a lot of details, such as specific loan limits, elimination of Grad PLUS, usage of Earnings Premium metric with state-level comparators, etc. So a big challenge for negotiated rulemaking is figuring out which issues identified by the public and by negotiators can feasibly be addressed without a new law. Given my reading of the constraints, here are the biggest areas that ED might address to help fix a lot of the concerns from comments.

• Refining the Appeals Process: The Department's most critical regulatory lever is the design of a robust appeals process. This is the primary tool available to mitigate the EP metric’s fundamental statutory flaw, detailed in Section 1.2, regarding regional and demographic disparities. The process must allow institutions to submit countervailing evidence on local economic conditions, mission-specific outcomes (e.g., public service careers), or the demographic characteristics of their student population to contest a failing determination.

• Defining Graduate Program Comparison Groups: The Department must act on the technical recommendation to group related two-digit CIP codes. This action will create more statistically reliable comparison groups for graduate programs, resolving a key technical challenge in the statute and ensuring that outcomes are based on sound data.

• Implementing Anti-Gaming Provisions: To maintain the integrity of the program-level accountability system, the Department should introduce regulatory guardrails. A prominent recommendation that falls within the Department's authority is to require undergraduate students to declare a major by their third year of study to remain eligible for federal aid, preventing institutions from circumventing the rules.

• Defining "Professional Degree": The Department's most urgent task is to issue a clear, criteria-based definition of "professional degree." Failure to do so will create significant disruption for critical workforce pipelines in health and human services, as evidenced by the widespread campaign from professional associations. This regulation must provide an expanded list of qualifying programs, taking into account the extensive feedback from health and service professions whose programs lead to state licensure.

• Interpreting the "Grandfather" Clause: The Department must navigate the clear policy trade-off presented by the ambiguous "grandfather" clause. A broad interpretation supports student continuity but, as financial aid administrators warned, risks abuse by "serial graduate students" accumulating excessive debt. A narrow interpretation prevents such gaming but could disrupt students already mid-program. A balanced approach is required. The Department should consider adopting a broad interpretation for students pursuing their first post-baccalaureate degree, while applying a narrow one to those pursuing subsequent graduate degrees to prevent abuse without penalizing students who planned in good faith.

• Providing Timely Guidance: A universal demand from all stakeholders is for the Department to issue clear, comprehensive guidance and technical assistance. Fulfilling this core administrative function is essential for helping institutions and financial aid administrators navigate the complex transition to the new lending framework and must be a top priority.

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