In the Crosshairs?
Education Department officials have been insisting for months that, despite the warnings of some Wall Street analysts to the contrary, the federal government is not intent on intensifying its regulation of for-profit higher education.
That assertion got a little harder to believe on Friday, when the department announced the composition of a committee charged with negotiating a set of new federal regulations related to the integrity of federal financial aid programs. Given the issues on the panel's agenda, its membership leans notably toward critics of the for-profit sector of higher education, and decidedly short on representatives of the colleges.
As is typically the case in the federal negotiated rule making process (which is explained here), the department's September 9 announcement inviting nominations for the committees said it would populate the panels with people who "represent the interests significantly affected by the topics proposed for negotiations."
In this case, the topics under the overall rubric of the integrity of federal financial aid programs include such things as incentive compensation for college recruiters and the use of tests to gauge students' "ability to benefit" from a higher education, which are heavily used by for-profit universities, community colleges, and other open-access institutions.
What's more unexpected, perhaps, is that the group gathered by the department to negotiate a set of issues that relate heavily to for-profit institutions contains so many other members with a clearly stated antipathy toward the sector, and so few members from for-profit institutions themselves. [Inside Higher Ed]
