Post by Noodle

Phil Hill & Associates' On EdTech had a good breakdown this week of the new Department of Education earnings accountability rules (and a follow-up, "Updates on Accountability Rule" that Premium subscribers can access). The bottom line is that the framework hasn't changed, but the timeline has, with earnings measured four years after a student completes a program and reported through a data pipeline that runs years behind real time. That lag raises a question worth sitting with: if the metric that decides a program's fate is always looking several years into the past, how much can short-term signals like early placement rates really tell you? Noodle's Stephen Green explored a related idea last week, that a longer measurement horizon gets closer to whether a program actually worked. Full piece linked below.