Data, College, and State Power

I don’t know enough about the subject, so I guess I’ll just ask.  Is this to be taken seriously?

Last week’s announcement of new rules to bear down on career colleges like the University of Phoenix, which offer degrees in programs like Health Administration and Criminal Justice Administration, weren’t designed to force those questions. These programs come under a different section in the Higher Education Act, excluding them from regulations for how much money their graduates make. But the new rules — the gainful employment rules, as they’re called — could push federal regulators to start peering under the hood of more traditional colleges majors, according to reporting by Inside Higher Ed.

The issue is that the new regulations create the regulatory structure and a political vacuum ripe for more regulations. The rules, which penalize career colleges whose students cannot repay their loans, inaugurate what Kevin Carey, policy director for the Think Tank Education Sector, calls in the article a “new era of widely available data about how much college graduates earn and what kind of jobs they take.” He goes on to describe how, now that the beast is built, it will be easier for government to expand into other areas of education regulation. Once government policymakers can wield this data, it is only a matter of time before calls to clamp down on and curb federal spending throughout higher ed are heard.

…to be clear, my question here is not about the for profit institutions, but rather about the use of regulations targeting for profit institutions against traditional majors.