On July 2, 2026, Mark Harris introduced a bill with a friendly name and a very short job description.

The Promoting Access and Revenue Integrity Through Institutional Transparency Act — the PARITY Act — does two things, both of them deletions. It repeals Section 487(a)(24) of the Higher Education Act, and it repeals Section 487(d), which is how that first section gets enforced.

Section 487(a)(24) is the 90/10 rule.

What the rule actually does

The 90/10 rule says that a for-profit college can't get more than 90% of its revenue from federal money. It has to find at least a tenth of its income somewhere else — real students paying with real dollars that didn't come from the U.S. Treasury.

That's the entire rule. It doesn't cap enrollment. It doesn't ban anything. It's a market test: if literally nobody will pay for your program except the federal government, that's evidence your program isn't worth what you're charging.

Harris's argument is that it's unfair, because it applies only to for-profit schools and not to public or nonprofit ones.

"Washington should not pick winners and losers in higher education," he said in his announcement. "By repealing the outdated 90/10 rule, the PARITY Act ends a double standard that singles out career schools and ensures every institution is treated fairly."

House Education and Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg called the rule "outdated" too. Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana, who is carrying the Senate version, said it's "time to level the playing field."

Here's the part none of those three statements mention: how the 90/10 rule got its teeth back, and who it got them back from.

The loophole was a machine for recruiting veterans

For years, the 90/10 rule had a hole in it. GI Bill benefits and Defense Department Tuition Assistance are federal money — but they weren't counted on the federal side of the 90/10 ledger. They counted as the other 10%.

Think about what that does to a for-profit school's incentives. Every veteran you enroll doesn't just bring tuition. Each one lets you enroll roughly nine more students on federal student aid without breaking the rule. A veteran wasn't a student. A veteran was a key.

The result was documented over and over: aggressive, deceptive recruiting aimed straight at service members and veterans, at schools that then failed to deliver the jobs they'd promised. In 2014 alone, an estimated $2 billion in GI Bill funding and $248 million in Defense Department tuition assistance went uncounted in the federal revenue calculation for for-profit colleges.

Congress closed that loophole in 2021 with votes from both parties. The Education Department's rule implementing it took effect January 1, 2023.

So when Harris says the 90/10 rule is "outdated," he is describing a guardrail that has been fully functional for three years, after Congress spent a decade fighting to fix it.

"Pure corporate welfare for subpar schools preying on students"

Harris's bill is not the first attempt. House Republicans put a full 90/10 repeal into the tax and spending package that moved in 2025. Harris's own press release says so: "In the House-passed version, House Republicans repealed 90/10 completely, but the repeal was not included in the Senate's version that became law."

When that push was live, veterans' groups did not treat it as a paperwork cleanup.

Barmak Nassirian of Veterans Education Success told Military.com:

"The 90/10 rule is a modest market-viability requirement that ensures that the federal government isn't the only source of a college's revenues. Repealing it is nothing short of pure corporate welfare for subpar schools preying on students."

Allison Jaslow, the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, called the repeal language an "assault on veterans education," demanded it be pulled, and said members who kept it "should feel the wrath of the veterans community."

The Congressional Budget Office scored repealing the rule at roughly $1.6 billion in additional federal cost over ten years. That's not a savings measure. It's a transfer — from taxpayers to the schools that couldn't clear a 10% test.

The Senate stripped the repeal out. Harris reintroduced it as a standalone bill anyway.

North Carolina has 615,440 veterans

This is not an abstract policy fight for the state Harris represents.

North Carolina is home to 615,440 veterans — about 7.3% of everyone in the state, according to VA data. Thirty-seven percent of them have a service-connected disability. Nearly eight percent live below the poverty line.

And the market Harris says is being unfairly singled out is not large in his state. As the Carolina Journal reported, North Carolina has roughly 44 for-profit institutions enrolling about 10,900 students total — Strayer's North Carolina campus, MyComputerCareer in Raleigh, NASCAR Technical Institute in Mooresville, Miller-Motte, and a long list of cosmetology and barber programs.

So the bill protects a sector serving about eleven thousand North Carolinians from a rule that only bites when a school can't attract a single non-federal dollar for more than nine out of ten enrollments — in a state with more than 600,000 veterans whose benefits are exactly what made that sector worth farming in the first place.

The fair version of his argument

To be straight about it: Harris is right that the rule applies unevenly. Public and nonprofit colleges take federal student aid and face no 90/10 test. That's a real inconsistency, and plenty of people who defend the rule concede it.

There are two ways to fix an inconsistency. You can extend the standard to everyone, or you can delete it for the people who don't like it.

Harris's bill deletes it. There is no replacement guardrail in the PARITY Act — no new limit, no new disclosure, nothing that would stop a school from running on 100% federal money again. Harris and Banks argue a separate earnings-and-return-on-investment standard passed in the Working Families Tax Cuts Act makes 90/10 redundant. Nassirian's answer to that argument was that the replacement framework is "high-risk, complicated and untested" and "contains no safety net" if it doesn't work.

Harris sits on the Education and Workforce Committee, and this is his first term. A week after the PARITY Act, he introduced two more bills — one for K-12, one for higher education — to move the Education Department's two biggest program offices over to the Labor Department. Both are part of the ten-bill package that committee advanced in July to break up the Department of Education and scatter its work across other agencies.

For a member who says Washington shouldn't pick winners and losers, he has been remarkably consistent about which side keeps winning.

We deserve better.

Source

Harris takes aim at federal rule career schools call unfair — Carolina Journal, July 2, 2026. Photo: U.S. Air Force via Military.com.