Final Regulations Issued on Host of Education Issues
The Department of Education published final regulations on distance education, return to Title IV (R2T4), and the federal TRIO programs. These rules, which resulted from a negotiated rulemaking last year, will go into effect on July 1, 2026.
Notably, virtually all of the provisions that NAICU raised concerns about during the negotiated rulemaking and proposed rule stages appear to have been removed from the final regulations.
Although the 2024 negotiated rulemaking addressed multiple topics, the final rules published earlier this month do not address state authorization, accreditation, and cash management, which were the other three issues on the negotiating table. Instead, the Department terminated the negotiated rulemaking process for those three topics last week.
Distance Education
These new regulations amend the definition of distance education and require institutions to report on their distance education or correspondence courses. The final regulations, however, do not include proposed changes that would have expanded the definition of “additional location” to include virtual locations for online or correspondence courses and eliminated the ability to offer asynchronous clock hour distance education programs.
Return to Title IV
The R2T4 regulations provide an exemption from the calculation process for a specific circumstance, codify existing guidance, and simplify a few areas in the current calculation process, such as:
- Providing an exemption for institutions from needing to complete an R2T4 calculation when a student never begins their attendance;
- Codifying existing guidance that a student’s withdrawal date must be documented no later than 14 days after the student’s last date of attendance;
- Providing an allowance for incarcerated students to return to their program at a different point than the one they left;
- Simplifying the method for determining the percentage of payment periods of a clock-hour program; and
- Requiring that a module portion of a payment period only be used when a student begins attendance in the module.
The R2T4 regulations did not move forward with the contentious requirement that institutions take attendance for distance education courses.
TRIO
The final TRIO regulation was limited to a technical amendment adding the Republic of Palau to the list of Freely Associated States. The Department withdrew a proposal to specifically allow undocumented students to participate in TRIO programs.
For more information, please contact:
or Justin Monk