The Trump administration has taken its first shot at rules designed to protect students from expensive, low-quality colleges and career training programs. Less than a month after Betsy DeVos was sworn in as its top official, the U.S. Department of Education announced Monday evening that it would delay until July 1 an effort to crack down on career training programs that load students up with unpayable debt. The biggest winners: the more than 800 higher educational programs that claim to lead to “gainful employment” but flunked the department’s January excessive debt test—mostly for-profit art and cosmetology schools. These programs can now continue to recruit applicants (at least until July 1) without having to warn them about alumni’s oppressively high debt loads. The schools can also take this extra time to seek data showing that their graduates’ student loan bills are actually below the official “excessive debt” cutoff. That means bills must be no more than 12% of the average student’s gross earnings, as reported to the Social Security Administration, and no more than 30% of their discretionary income. That means, for example, that students considering entering, say, the Art Institute of Pittsburgh’s two-year Associate’s program in graphic design won’t necessarily be warned that the typical graduate of the program has taken on about $40,000 in debt, but finds a job paying only about $22,000 a year. The monthly financial reality for such graduates is grim. Their before-tax monthly salary works out to about $1,900. The monthly payments on a standard 10-year student loan repayment plan top $400 – or more than 20% of their gross earnings. The department said it would use the extra time to “further review the [Gainful Employment] regulations and their implementation.” The action puts the brakes on one of many last-minute moves by the Obama administration. In January, the Department of Education issued an analysis of the earnings and student debt levels of more than 8,600 higher education programs that offer pr