Northwest Education Law Blog : Northwest Education Lawyer & Attorney : Williams Kastner Law Firm : Tacoma, Seattle, Portland

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

More than 220 colleges have long-term student loan default rates so high that they would lose all federal student financial assistance under the terms of a new law that eventually will measure those rates over a three-year time scale, according to new Education Department figures.

Student-loan defaults are more common at for-profit colleges and other institutions that serve lower-income populations, and the move toward a stiffer default-rate measure has left many of those institutions warning of a growing harm to the students most in need.  "The only thing that explains default rate is the socioeconomic background" of the student, said Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, which represents for-profit institutions. "By using that as the metric of quality, you will always be discriminating against low-income students."

Most students are required to begin paying back federally subsidized loans six months after they graduate or otherwise leave school. A college can lose eligibility for both grants and loans if its default rate exceeds 40 percent among its former students in the first year after they're due to begin repayment. Colleges also can lose eligibility if the rate of borrowers defaulting within two years of their scheduled start of repayment is 25 percent or greater for three consecutive years.

A new law, the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HR 4137), approved last year by Congress, will change that last measure, effective in 2012, to begin counting borrowers who default within three years of their scheduled repayment. Using that three-year window, colleges would be ineligible if their borrower default rate is 30 percent or greater for three consecutive years. [Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Inside Higher Ed reports:

"The chairmen of Congress's education committees on Thursday disputed a report that a proposed lender alternative to President Obama's student loan restructuring proposal would save nearly as much money as the administration's plan. Rep. George Miller and Sen. Tom Harkin were responding to news reports indicating that the Congressional Budget Office had "scored" an alternative put forward by Sen. Robert Casey on behalf of lender groups as saving $75 billion, within striking distance of the amount projected to be saved by President Obama's plan to end lending through the guaranteed loan program. The higher level of savings would be achieved through a series of budget gimmicks, the Democratic lawmakers wrote."

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Any thoughts that the U.S. Department of Education planned only to tweak existing regulations that affect for-profit colleges and other higher-education sectors were dashed on Monday when the agency released a draft of proposed revisions to a panel of negotiators. Many people in higher education, especially those in the for-profit sector, were taken aback at the substantial changes proposed, with some calling the move "aggressive" and "surprisingly strong."

The panel, whose members include federal officials and representatives of institutions and associations affected by the regulations, has been charged with re-examining 14 rules in a process known as negotiated rule-making. Among the department's proposed changes are eliminating the 12 "safe harbors" adopted in 2002 to clarify a ban on incentive compensation for student recruiters. The safe harbors specify types of compensation plans that do not violate the ban.

Other proposed changes deal with assuring the integrity of "ability to benefit" testing procedures, defining a high-school diploma, and determining how institutions ensure gainful employment for their students.

Another area of concern was the department's consideration of changes in a rule that requires for-profit institutions to show that a percentage of their graduates find "gainful employment." The department decided not to provide draft regulatory language on gainful employment at this time. However, department officials are considering two options for determining whether institutions are complying with that rule. One would require a college to show a "reasonable relationship" between the price a student is charged for a specific program and the "value added," which the department suggests could be defined as the difference between the salaries in that field earned by the average graduate of the program and the average high-school graduate. Another option would be to look at whether a student's starting annual income was adequate to cover student-loan obligations for the program "while still having an adequate amount available to meet living expenses."

In another area, the department's suggestion that institutions be required to keep listings of high schools in three categories related to the established validity of their diplomas also did not go over well. Harris N. Miller, president and chief executive of the Career College Association, which represents about 1,400 institutions, most of them operated for profit, said the onus should be on the federal government, not the institutions. The government, he said, is the one entity that can keep a list of legitimate schools.

The department also proposed new measures regarding the administration of "ability to benefit" tests. Students who do not have a high-school diploma or a GED, and have not completed high school through home schooling, have to pass an ability-to-benefit test to qualify for federal student aid.

The department has proposed requiring publishers of ability-to-benefit tests to establish a process to identify and follow up on test-score irregularities. A test publisher would be required to decertify test administrators if it determined that test had been administered improperly. Last summer the Government Accountability Office said in a report that officials administering such a test at one college had given out answers and changed answers for students. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

As Democrats in the House of Representatives joined the Obama administration in urging college leaders to prepare for the government's seemingly likely switch to 100 percent direct student lending, Congressional Republicans issued a challenge of their own, introducing legislation (with the support of one key Democrat) that would extend a stopgap 2007 law that sustained the lender-based guaranteed loan program with a massive infusion of federal funds. That legislation, the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act, made the federal government the backstop for federal student loans issued by banks and other lenders. Education Department officials have cited the June 30 expiration of the law as a major reason why the administration's plan to shift all student lending to the direct loan program must proceed apace, and Reps. George Miller and Ruben Hinojosa sent a letter to college presidents Wednesday urging them to get their campuses ready for the switch, even though the legislation has passed only the House and faces a fight in the Senate. But by proposing an extension of ECASLA, Republicans are essentially giving lawmakers uneasy about pushing ahead with a massive change in federal policy a potential alternative. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

WASHINGTON — Top federal food regulators threatened on Friday to ban caffeinated alcoholic drinks unless their makers quickly proved that the beverages were safe.

In a statement, the Food and Drug Administration said it had told nearly 30 manufacturers of the drinks that unless they could provide clear evidence of safety, it would “take appropriate action to ensure that the products are removed from the marketplace.” Officials did not say how long such a determination might take.

The drinks, which combine malt liquor or other spirits with caffeine and fruit juices at alcohol concentrations up to about 10 percent, have become increasingly popular among college students. In a news conference, Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, the agency’s principal deputy commissioner, said their consumption was associated with increased risk of serious injury, drunken driving, sexual assault and other dangerous behavior.

The brands under scrutiny, which include Joose from United Brands, are being marketed to young people with social marketing tools. United Brands, for instance, has a Twitter site to market Joose. [New York Times]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The U.S. Education Department published final regulations Wednesday laying out the requirements for what states must report to the federal government to receive money in 2010 through the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which provided tens of billions of dollars of economic stimulus funds. The rules, which were published in the Federal Register, focus mostly on elementary and secondary education, but they mandate that states be able to collect (from colleges) and publicly report data regarding student enrollment and credit completion. [Inside Higher Education]
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

A change in the way the federal government will report race and ethnicity data for educational institutions is making it necessary for the university to collect new information from students, faculty and staff.

Beginning in 2010, the U.S. Department of Education is moving away from the practice of classifying individuals by one racial category, and it is changing the way institutions report their data.

The most notable change in the Integrated Post-secondary Educational Data System (IPEDS) is a two-part question that first asks individuals to indicate if their ethnicity is Hispanic or Latino, before moving on to a second part that allows them to identify as more than one race.

While the new survey allows individuals to indicate more than one racial category, students applying for admissions under a revised application no longer will be able to self-identify using multi-ethnic or multi-racial labels of their own choosing, such as Burmese, Comanche or Jewish.

IPEDS tracks aggregate information about enrollment, program completion, graduation rates, faculty and staff, finances, institutional prices, and student financial aid from every college, university, and technical and vocational institution in the United States and other jurisdictions (such as Puerto Rico) that participate in the federal student financial aid programs. [EnerPub]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, the top Republican on the House education committee, is accusing the Education Department of improperly lobbying colleges to support legislation to overhaul student loans. He says the department has pressed institutions to switch to its direct-loan system before Congress votes to terminate the bank-based system of student lending. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

WASHINGTON -- Just as new scrutiny surfaces on the University of Phoenix’s alleged use of illegal recruiting practices, a Department of Education-appointed panel debated possible changes in federal rules governing recruiter compensation for bringing students to their institutions.

In discussions Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, the team of negotiators charged with considering the revision of regulations meant to protect federal financial aid programs from potential abuses by colleges, universities and others turned to the rules guiding incentive compensation for recruiters, financial aid officers and others who may get paid based on how many students apply to or enroll at their institution.

The department chose to reopen the issue in this current round of "negotiated rule making," in an attempt to see whether some or all of the safe harbors needed to be revised or eliminated, or if others ought to be added.

Though complaints about aggressive recruiting tactics have come from all kinds of institutions, there was an inferred emphasis on for-profits like Phoenix (which, for its part, refutes the allegations made by ProPublica and NPR's "Marketplace" in the news story mentioned above). Hawkins said NACAC has catalogued violations “taking place primarily in the for-profit sector but also in nonprofits.” His group’s policies regard admission officers “as professionals, rather than salespersons” and support a full ban on incentive compensation.

Margaret Reiter, a former California deputy attorney general on the panel representing consumer advocacy organizations, voiced specific concerns about the language in almost all of the safe harbors. [Inside Higher Ed]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The U.S. Department of Education has released a template that colleges can use to create the net-price calculators they are required to offer on their Web sites in two years.

The calculators, which are required under a provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, will allow prospective students and their families to estimate their personal out-of-pocket expenses at a particular college.

Colleges have two years, until October 29, 2011, to have their calculators up and running, but they have been encouraged to take action sooner, and some already have made calculators available. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

WASHINGTON -- Tensions between for-profit institutions and their foes came to the fore as a panel of concerned parties convened here Monday afternoon to begin the multi-month process of working out new regulations governing the integrity of federal financial aid programs.

It was the first day of a four-day session (to be followed by two more four-day sessions, one in December, the other in January) of negotiated rule making, intended to help the Department of Education craft regulations on a series of issues that the department can use to oversee institutions that receive federal financial aid under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965.

Among the issues up for discussion are incentive compensation for recruiters, the alleged misrepresentation of information to students, and how to disburse financial aid to programs that offer instruction in modules or compressed timeframes, rather than typical semesters. All are controversial issues in the world of for-profit colleges. The audience of the open-to-the-public event included dozens of for-profit lobbyists and staffers.

So, as could have been anticipated, the first real discord in the process came in finalizing just who would serve on the panel. The department selected committee members who “represent the interests significantly affected by the topics proposed for negotiations,” but gave just three of the panel’s 28 spots to representatives of private, for-profit institutions. After the meeting started, a fourth -- Michale S. McComis, executive director of the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges -- was added without objection as an alternate.

Elaine Neely, the only primary negotiator representing for-profits, proposed the addition of two more primary negotiators: Jeff Arthur, of ECPI College of Technology and co-chair of the Career College Association’s regulatory affairs committee, and William Leach, of Lincoln Educational Services. “It’s important that we have other members of proprietary schools at the table given the number of issues and … students we represent,” she said.

The most vocal opposition came from Margaret Reiter, a lawyer and the primary negotiator representing consumer advocacy organizations. In 2007, as a California deputy attorney general, she filed suit against Corinthian Colleges, Inc., and won a $6.5 million settlement for the state. She said the group was already large enough with 14 primary negotiators, all with alternates, and should “go forward with the size group we have.” Pressed for further explanation of her position, Reiter said she thought the panel was already “a well-balanced group representing a variety of constituencies.” Adding more representatives of for-profits, she said, would make the conversation “a little more weighted” and do so unnecessarily since “the proprietary schools tend to have a fairly consistent view among them.” [Inside Higher Ed]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

NEW YORK — Shares of for-profit education companies tumbled Wednesday a day after Apollo Group Inc., one of the largest and oldest of the companies, said the Securities and Exchange Commission had launched an "informal inquiry" into its revenue accounting practices, its second SEC probe this year.

"We are confident that the SEC's accounting issue is specific to (Apollo)," wrote RBC Capital Markets analyst Robert Wetenhall in a note to investors Wednesday. DeVry Inc., another of the more-established higher education providers, said on its Tuesday evening earnings conference call that it had not been contacted by the SEC and was not concerned. But the rest of the sector will likely be under pressure "until the dust settles."

SEC inquiries often end without finding harm done by the company. Still, the probe comes at a time when the Department of Education is keeping an eye on the sector at large. In a Congressional hearing earlier this month, Mary Mitchelson, an inspector general of the Education Department, described investigations of different schools' attendance-tracking and financial aid practices. She said the government would continue to pursue cases of "diploma mills" and eligibility exams.

The Government Accountability Office in September released a report critical of the for-profit schools' student loan default rates. The GAO said many proprietary schools admitted unqualified students who had a greater tendency than other students to drop out, let students stay enrolled despite a lack of academic progress and also misrepresented themselves to prospective students. That prompted the Congressional hearing on Oct. 14 at which Mitchelson testified, along with other GAO and Education Department officials. [The Associated Press]
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

A Congressional panel voted today to expand federal oversight over private student loans, but refused to clarify that institutional "gap loans" would be covered.

By a vote of 33 to 35, the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee rejected an amendment to legislation (HR 3126) to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would have put loans made by for-profit institutions under the agency's purview. Consumer advocates have warned that the loans, called gap loans because they cover the difference between federal aid and the cost of college, could be exempt under language that was added to the bill to protect small businesses.

"This is a clear case of a solution in search of a problem," said Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association. "Our schools should not be saddled with additional compliance requirements simply because they are attempting to help those in financial need get the education necessary to build better, more successful lives."

Before approving the overall legislation, on a vote of 39 to 29, the committee also rejected an amendment by Rep. Tom Price, a Republican of Georgia, that would have exempted all student-loan providers from the agency's oversight. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Exhorted by consumer groups, the Obama administration and its Democratic allies in Congress are moving to create a federal Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which is designed to regulate credit card fees and other forms of consumer credit that get comparatively little oversight from existing federal agencies. Advocates for students have argued that the new agency could fill what they say are significant gaps in the government's ability to regulate non-federal student loans, which grew steadily in popularity as college tuitions rose throughout this decade. But as the House of Representatives drafts its version of legislation to create the new agency, a broad coalition of groups are concerned that lawmakers may ignore a burgeoning form of alternative loans: those that for-profit colleges make directly to students to fill gaps in their ability to pay.

They are urging Congressional Democrats to clarify that a planned exemption in the bill designed to shield local merchants from excessive regulation would not apply to publicly traded higher education companies that are directly giving students tens of millions of dollars in small loans, often structured as consumer financing rather than student loans, and sometimes at double digit interest rates.

"To effectively protect consumers, the CFPA must have full authority to regulate private student loans regardless of the institution offering them," the groups wrote in a letter this month to Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. "For consumers, a private student loan can pose the same serious risks whether issued by a financial institution or by a school. The CFPA should apply and enforce standards based upon the product and not the issuing institution."

For-profit college officials say the groups misrepresent the nature of the loans, which they say are designed to fill the gap (often as little as $1,000) between the federal aid the students qualify for and the cost of their educations, funds that have been harder for students to come by since the tightened credit markets crimped the availability of other private student loans. They also point out that relatively few colleges provide such financing, and argue that private student loans -- including those issued by institutions -- are already regulated, thanks to changes made in last year's renewal of the Higher Education Act. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

An audit of the U.S. Department of Education's information systems for managing the federal student-aid programs is calling for increased security, saying several vulnerabilities could compromise the confidentiality and availability of financial and personal data in the systems. The report, by the department's Office of Inspector General, gives no indication that the flaws have led to a security breach, but it says the department needs to improve security controls over the certification and accreditation process for the systems. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Education Department is stepping up its oversight of the basic-skills tests that students without a high-school diploma or GED can use to qualify for federal student aid, a top official told members of Congress on Wednesday.

Testifying before a U.S. House of Representatives education subcommittee, Robert M. Shireman, deputy under secretary of education, said the department has put in place systems to better monitor publishers of the assessments, known as "ability to benefit" tests, and will revisit regulations governing the tests during a rule-making session that starts in November. The department will also consider publishing lists of legitimate institutions and diploma mills to help for-profit colleges differentiate between valid and invalid degrees, he said.

Wednesday's hearing came less than a month after the Government Accountability Office reported it had found that officials administering an ability-to-benefit test at a for-profit college had given out answers and had changed answer sheets so that students would be eligible for federal funds. In its report, the GAO also found that officials at two proprietary schools had helped prospective students obtain invalid high-school diplomas from diploma mills.

The report, "Proprietary Schools: Stronger Department of Education Oversight Needed to Help Ensure Only Eligible Students Receive Federal Student Aid," got the attention of the chairman of the House education committee, who called its findings "extremely troubling." In an e-mail message to Bloomberg News last month, the chairman, Rep. George Miller, Democrat of California, said he would hold hearings on whether for-profit colleges were "gaming the system" to enroll "students who may not be fully ready for college and may be more likely to default" on loans.

Wednesday's hearing did little to answer those questions, though it did give the Education Department and for-profit colleges an opportunity to defend themselves. In his testimony, Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, argued that most of his members "play by the rules" and stressed that the report had not uncovered any "pattern of abuse." [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Surveys by two regional groups of financial aid directors suggest that, despite assurances from the U.S. Education Department, many college officials are worried about the impact that proposed changes in federal student loan programs will have on their institutions and students. The Western and Southern affiliates of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators both asked their members whose institutions are still in the lender-based Federal Family Education Loan Program about the impact they envision from President Obama's proposal to shift all federal lending to the competing direct loan program, a change that would be carried out by legislation that has passed the House of Representatives and will soon be introduced in the Senate. Two-thirds of aid officers said that they were "very" or "extremely" concerned about the prospect of making such a shift by July 2010, as the legislation currently envisions, and nearly half said they expected a significant or severe impact on their budgets. Education Department officials have repeatedly sought to assure aid administrators that the many institutions that have made the shift have had an easy time of it. [Inside Higher Ed]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

A federal watchdog agency has called on the Education Department to crack down on for-profit colleges and test administrators after an investigation showed high default rates on student loans and cheating on some exams. The problem lies with an Education Department that has "significant vulnerabilities" in its oversight, the Government Accountability Office told Congress in a recent report.

The GAO called on the department to take several steps, including monitoring for-profit schools and testing programs more closely and ensuring that students don’t get high school diplomas from diploma mills — another problem that was identified. Students can qualify for federal student loans and other aid if they have diplomas or pass these tests. If they default on the loans, federal taxpayers must pick up the cost.

In response, Education Department officials said they expect to implement new rules."We kind of knew we had this issue, and we began to tighten up on our monitoring and test-publishing before the GAO report," said Jeff Baker with the department’s office of federal student aid.

The Career College Association in Washington, D.C., a national group that represents career and for-profit schools, said in a statement that "we share the government’s interest in eliminating any form of fraud and abuse associated with" the federal financial aid program. But the report should be taken in context, the association said. "Nothing in the GAO report suggests that the practice of admitting unqualified students is widespread or indicative of the sector as a whole," the statement said.

Recommendations The federal Government Accountability Office recommended that the Education Department:

-Strengthen its monitoring of for-profit schools and the ability-to-benefit test program. Officials should look at data where test administrators improperly oversaw tests and use that data to identify potential future abuses.

-Require test publishers to conduct an analysis about every 18 months of ATB tests in addition to the current three-year analysis to help better identify irregularities.

-Have an action plan to prevent test administrators who allow cheating from getting additional work from the exam’s publishers.

-Have easily accessible information available — for example on a Web site — that lists state-approved high schools. Officials can then more easily identify diploma mills. [Star-Telegram]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Apollo Group, parent company of the University of Phoenix, announced today that it was holding settlement discussions with the parties that have accused it of falsely obtaining billions of dollars in federal student aid while violating rules over how student recruiters are paid. The case, which has been working its way through the courts for several years, is slated for trial in March, but the parties have now agreed to stay all proceedings in the litigation for 45 days. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

College governing boards need to get more involved in the accrediting process at the institutions they serve, helping to preserve a longstanding system of self regulation and peer review that is not without its critics, two major advocacy organizations said today. The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation released a joint statement today, urging boards to play an integral role in the accreditation process.

“Beyond the heightened individual, societal, and economic pressures for accountability, American higher education remains collectively responsible to the broader public good,” the statement reads. “As such, governing boards can assure policy makers and the public that the unique U.S. higher education enterprise is operating with integrity and stability, is delivering high-quality academic programs, and is worthy of its autonomous authority and self-regulation by demonstrating their engagement in the accreditation process.”

The accreditation movement, which began for institutions and programs about 100 years ago, has emerged as academe’s standard measure for assuring academic quality. Even so, the process has become a familiar target for critics who say it fails to effectively assess learning outcomes and needs greater oversight from outside academe. Former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called the current accreditation model “insular” and “clubby,” leaving institutions “accountable to no one but themselves.”

The push for more accountability in higher education has led to the development of a series of new tools, including the Voluntary System of Accountability and the Collegiate Learning Assessment. Those tools can be an important companion to accreditation, but not a replacement, Eaton said.

The AGB/CHEA statement lays out a series of suggestions for both governing boards and chief executive officers. Included in the recommendations are the establishment of an ongoing orientation or accreditation education program for board members; a review of key elements of an institution’s accreditation self study; and participation in the accreditation process. Chief executive officers are also advised to inform the board of specific governance-related criteria that will be evaluated during the accreditation process. [Inside Higher Ed]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

In response to Monday's Government Accountability Office report on loan defaults and basic skills tests at for-profit colleges and universities, the chairman of the House education committee, Rep. George Miller of California, has called for hearings on whether such institutions are "gaming the system," Bloomberg News reports. Some higher-education experts, however, noted that the report contains some positive findings about for-profit colleges, including that some of them have among the lowest loan-default rates of all colleges in the country. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

WASHINGTON -- For weeks, spilling into months, those who watch the for-profit sector of higher education most closely (especially Wall Street analysts and some of the colleges' critics) have been speculating about what the U.S. Government Accountability Office was cooking up in a report on the institutions.

Now we know, in the form of some critical findings and a suggestion that the Education Department crank up its scrutiny of the career-related colleges. But Wall Street shrugged off the findings, with stocks for the major publicly traded higher education companies all rising Monday in the wake of what one analyst called the "most positive report we've seen from any government entity" about for-profit colleges.

The most damning aspect of the report -- one of the two that Congress's investigative arm released Monday, with the other on minority-serving colleges -- was the GAO's revelation that officials at a Washington-area branch of one publicly traded for-profit college appears to have violated federal rules when they gave answers to, and "tampered" with answers given by, GAO analysts who posed as prospective students on academic tests designed to measure their "ability to benefit" from a higher education.

The Career College Association, which represents most of the nation's 1,200 for-profit colleges, expressed dismay about the allegations of wrongdoing but noted that the GAO report suggests that they are unrepresentative. "We abhor any practice that breaks the rules or the law to admit unqualified students, whether through fraudulent testing practices or bogus high school degrees. We share the government’s interest in eliminating any form of fraud and abuse associated with the Title IV program," the association said in a prepared statement. "The GAO report describes the actions of a few school personnel and testing personnel behaving in an unethical manner. Nothing in the GAO report suggests that the practice of admitting unqualified students is widespread or indicative of the sector as a whole." [Inside Higher Ed]
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives on Thursday approved sweeping legislation to overhaul the student loan programs and redirect tens of billions of dollars to student aid and other education programs, brushing aside Republican opposition and handing President Obama a significant legislative victory. The House's approval of the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009, which had been a foregone conclusion for months, shifts the action to the Senate, where the outcome is slightly less predictable.

The student aid bill, a top domestic priority for the Obama administration, would cease all lending from the bank-based Family Federal Education Loan Program and use the savings the government derives from lending more cheaply for a wide array of purposes, only some of which, to the dismay of some college officials, are in higher education. Among other things, the legislation would:

• Provide $40 billion over 10 years to increase the maximum Pell Grant to $5,550 and ensure that it would increase annually by the rise in the Consumer Price Index plus 1 percent.
• Greatly expand and alter the criteria for the Perkins Loan Program.
• Pour $10 billion into community colleges in support of President Obama's American Graduation Initiative, designed to produce 5 million more two-year college graduates by 2020.
• Spend $8 billion over 10 years to strengthen early childhood education.
• Create a College Access and Completion Fund that would give grants to states and institutions with innovative approaches to increasing college going and graduation.
• Provide $4.1 billion to modernize and repair school and college facilities, including those damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
• Make the interest rates on federal student loans variable beginning in 2012, when they are set to rise back to 6.8 percent.
• Simplify the federal financial aid form. [Inside Higher Ed]
   

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

A controversial bill that would make it easier for employees of private colleges to unionize is most likely dead for the year, the new chairman of the Senate education committee acknowledged on Thursday. Speaking to supporters of the bill, Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said the measure remains one of his top priorities but may have to wait for next year, when the seat left open by the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy will be filled by special election. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Health care is dominating the headlines and consuming most of the oxygen in federal politics these days, and that's likely to remain the case through the fall as President Obama and Congress work to pass legislation to reform the American medical system.

But as lawmakers returned to work this week after their August recess, a flurry of news developments Wednesday served as a reminder that higher education issues remain a top priority for the administration and its Democratic allies on Capitol Hill.

Among the developments:

• The Education Department on Wednesday announced that it would create two committees of college officials, consumer groups and others to propose new federal regulations governing foreign schools and issues related to the "integrity" of the student financial aid programs.
• Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat known for his strong support of the National Institutes of Health, will replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy as chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. The way was cleared for Harkin when Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said he would remain as head of the Senate's banking committee.
• Vice President Joe Biden brought his White House Task Force on the Middle Class (and two Cabinet secretaries) to Syracuse University for a forum on college affordability, in a conversation that featured some tough talk about college tuition and lots of love for community colleges. In conjunction with the meeting, the White House also released three reports, on financial aid simplification, 529 savings plans, and the major barriers to a college education.

[Inside Higher Ed]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

As the Obama administration and Congress consider new legislation that could dramatically reshape the federal student aid programs, the Education Department is putting the finishing touches on carrying out the last set of major changes to federal laws governing higher education. The department on Friday proposed a set of regulations for a broad range of provisions -- on such topics as campus safety, illegal sharing of digital files, and educating students with disabilities -- that Congress enacted as part of last year's renewal of the Higher Education Act.

The regulations proposed Friday resulted from one of five negotiating teams that the Education Department established last winter to negotiate regulations to implement the Higher Education Opportunity Act. Two others related to loan issues, one to grants, and one to accreditation. This one, the fifth, was described by college lobbyists as the "cats and dogs committee," as it dealt with a wide array of issues -- many of them narrow -- of the sort that the Higher Education Act has increasingly come to be filled with. Depending on one's perspective, those issues are seen either as piling regulations on colleges or seeking to hold them increasingly accountable.

The designated negotiating team of college officials and others for this set of issues reached agreement on proposed regulatory language for all but 2 of the 31 issues they debated. But under federal guidelines, that failure meant that the agency in question (in this case the Education Department) had essentially free rein to propose whatever rules it wanted.

Comments on the proposed regulations may be submitted until September 21; final rules are due by November 1. [Inside Higher Ed]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Federal Reserve Board has published final rules governing private student loans. The "Truth in Lending" rules, which take effect in February 2010, add a series of new disclosure requirements to private loans; give consumers up to three days to cancel a consummated loan; and prohibit lenders from using colleges' names, mascots, or logos in their marketing materials. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

For several years, federal policy makers have been battling intensely over whether colleges discriminate in their transfer of credit policies against students from institutions that are accredited not by one of the six regional accrediting agencies, but instead by what are known as "national" accreditors. National accreditors focus on specific types of institutions rather than on colleges in a region, and by and large they are newer and less established than the regional accreditors.

In that skirmishing, most of the attention focuses on for-profit colleges, both because a majority of the national accrediting agencies focus on for-profit career-related colleges and because those institutions are growing and politically muscular. But several of the national accreditors work with faith-based institutions, and they, too, complain that their students sometimes face discrimination when they try to transfer their academic work because the receiving colleges say they accept credit only from regionally accredited institutions.

Being accredited by an agency that is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education is essential if a college wants its students to qualify for federal financial aid, as the government provides grants and loans only to students at such institutions. The federal government grants recognition to accreditors using a process in which a federal panel reviews their work every five years and makes recommendations to the education secretary, who rules thumbs up or down. Both types of accreditors, national and regional (and a third category, programmatic, but that's a story for another day) earn their recognition through the very same process, using the same standards. [Inside Higher Ed]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

TUI University inappropriately gave out an estimated $923,000 in financial aid funds to students who either were ineligible for the money or did not earn it because they withdrew from the institution, the U.S. Education Department's inspector general said in an audit released Thursday.

The inspector general's audit recommended that the Education Department's Federal Student Aid office require the for-profit university, which was the online arm of Touro University until its sale to private equity investors in 2007, to repay a minimum of $200,000 to the government and lenders for the money that it has already found should not have been distributed -- a figure that could climb if its recommendations are upheld by department leaders. The IG's office also suggests that the department "consider" taking much more serious action, to "fine, limit, suspend or terminate" TUI's ability to participate in the federal student aid programs.

University officials vigorously disputed the audit's findings and its recommendations, saying they were based on the misinterpretations of federal laws and rules by the inspector general itself. "The university believes that it has properly accounted for all of its Federal student financial aid funds, is taking steps to resolve issues raised in the OIG report, and does not anticipate there will not be any significant repayment liability or adverse impact on the institution upon resolution of this matter," Tom Finally, the vice president for administration, said via e-mail. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (4)
• Trackbacks

By now, everyone knows that the Obama administration's stimulus bill is designed to get the economy moving again. However, you may not know that most of the bill's $70 billion for education will go to low- to middle-income individuals.

A major part of the bill is a $13.8 billion tuition tax credit boost called the American Opportunity Tax Credit. This tax credit reimburses 100 percent of the first $2,000 of educational expenses for lower income students. For the next $2,000, students will receive a 25 percent reimbursement. In short, lower income students will receive $2,500 in education reimbursements per year.

The bill also features other benefits for low-income students. Families that do not earn enough to pay income taxes can receive a $1,000 education refund. [Career College Central]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Students frequently rent DVDs to watch in their dorm rooms, but soon they may start checking out something much heavier and pricier: textbooks.

Saying they offer an alternative to the textbook industry's bloated prices, a growing number of companies are renting new and used titles at reduced prices. Among them are Chegg, BookRenter and the Follett Higher Education Group, which will test drive a rental service at campus bookstores this fall. They join a number of colleges that have already started their own on-campus programs.

With all of them, the concept is essentially to pay to check out textbooks as if they're out of a library -- only there are more copies and titles, and they can be used for longer periods of time. Through Chegg, for instance, a student searches for a book and rents it for up to a certain number of days, such as up to a quarter or a semester. Users are promised discounts of 65 to 85 percent off the list price, but if they don't return a book on time, they are charged full price. The same punishment applies to doodling in the margins, since the books are meant for reuse. As a disclaimer on Chegg warns: "Highlighting in the textbook is OK -- to a certain extent. Writing in the book is not accepted.

Studies have shown that textbook prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation, but not as much as tuition and other higher education costs. Last year's Higher Education Opportunity Act mandated that institutions report annually how much they spend on essentially reducing the costs of textbooks and other instructional fees. It also required textbook publishers to expand the information they provide about pricing and changes from past editions. Most significantly for companies like Follett and Chegg, a bill outlining the U.S. Education Department's budget, crafted in February, mandated that $10 million be reserved for a "new college textbook rental initiative" to "provide competitive grants to colleges to expand opportunities for students to rent college course materials." [Inside Higher Ed]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

A majority of colleges plan next year to continue using a bank-based student-loan program that President Obama hopes to do away with the following year, according to survey results released on Monday by Student Lending Analytics, an independent research and advisory firm.

Mr. Obama has said the federal government will save billions of dollars each year by eliminating the federal guaranteed-loan program and switching all colleges to the government-run direct-lending program. But 56 percent of the 453 survey respondents will continue to use the guaranteed-loan program next year, and only 8 percent said they planned to switch to direct lending.

One out of five colleges that responded to the survey plan to use the direct-lending program in the 2009-10 academic year, and 7 percent are unsure which program they will use. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives on Wednesday formally introduced legislation to restructure the federal student aid programs and signaled their intention to move with lightning speed to pass it. The Committee on Education and Labor announced that it would take up the $87 billion legislation next Tuesday, and given the strong Democratic majority on the panel, as well as in Congress, passage is assured. The legislation got a strong endorsement Wednesday from the Obama administration, whose student loan proposal the House legislation closely mirrors. On a telephone news conference with Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, Education Secretary Arne Duncan offered his "clear support" for the House bill despite some differences with President Obama's original plan, and said it was fully consistent with the administration's plan's "fundamental principles."

Duncan and Miller also both went out of their way -- in discussing the money the House bill would make available to fund President Obama's proposed $12 billion community college initiative -- to emphasize how the legislation would turn up the pressure on colleges to ensure that they are not just admitting students, but getting them to degrees. Discussing community college graduation rates, Miller said that the "statistics are currently not acceptable to the administration or the Congress," and said the legislation was designed to ensure that "community colleges change and adapt to the needs of our society and our families. That test will be on the community colleges." [Inside Higher Ed]
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The last few weeks have witnessed a truly remarkable discussion in Washington and on Wall Street surrounding for-profit higher education.

Reports (and sometimes rumors) about the prospect of tougher federal regulation of career colleges by the Obama administration have made the rounds among Wall Street analysts, driving the stocks of the largest, publicly traded companies in the sector down by more than 20 percent and prompting the U.S. Education Department two weeks ago to hold unprecedented conference calls with investors and analysts to try to reassure them that department officials did not have it in for for-profit colleges.

The biggest dust-up, though, came last month when the department announced that it would undertake a new round of negotiations over possible changes to federal regulations governing policy areas, such as incentive compensation paid to student recruiters, that are predominantly a factor among career colleges.

The announcement of the new regulatory review was made quietly (as is the norm) in the Federal Register, but after some analysts cast the review as big trouble for the industry and others began bombarding the department with calls seeking clarification, Shireman decided to hold the unprecedented conference calls.

Jeffrey Volshteyn, a vice president at J.P. Morgan, is among the analysts who thinks that “people are just reading way too much into this,” and that the department will “enforce the rules just like it always has,” for the for-profit colleges and all others.

Jeffrey Silber of BMO Capital Markets, who is among the longest-serving analysts of the career college sector, tends to agree with Volshteyn that the department is not taking particular aim at for-profit colleges. But he also said that the uncertainty about the department’s agenda for rule making (an agenda that will take shape, in part, out of public hearings that begin this week) and the general inclination toward regulation of a Democratic administration are likely to provide plenty of fodder for those who seek to keep for-profit colleges -- and their stocks -- on the defensive.

“Could you see increased regulation” of for-profit colleges? he asked rhetorically. “Sure, though probably on the margins. But this thing is not going to be resolved for months, and there’s no telling what kind of noise will be generated in the meantime.” [Inside Higher Ed]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

In his remarks, the president himself acknowledged that job training was not a “silver bullet.” But he said his new proposal, hailed as significant by education advocates, would greatly increase the number of people who earn the sort of two-year associate’s degrees that employers increasingly demand.

“In the coming years,” Mr. Obama said, “jobs requiring at least an associate degree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs requiring no college experience. We will not fill those jobs, or keep those jobs on our shores, without the training offered by community colleges.”

Most of the $12 billion in Mr. Obama’s plan would go toward programs enticing community colleges to do more to lift graduation rates and better prepare students for jobs. Some would go to the modernizing of facilities as well, and some to the development of an Internet curriculum available to students everywhere.

Officials said that over the next 12 years, the plan would increase the number of community college graduates by a total of five million beyond the number who would graduate without it.

The new federal money would be spent over the course of a decade, starting with the fiscal year that begins in October. Officials said the cost of the legislation would be covered by savings from the president’s plan to end the role of private banks in the federal education lending system.

Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who heads the House Education and Labor Committee, said Tuesday that he would incorporate the president’s community college plan into the student loan bill, which Mr. Miller expects to introduce on Wednesday.

The loan legislation is facing an intense lobbying campaign by banks, making it one of several tough initiatives Mr. Obama is trying to push through Congress before the August recess. [The New York Times]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

A hot topic in Washington this week is the Obama administration's student-lending plan that could eliminate the need for guarantee agencies. While Congress is set to being debates on the plan, a new report from the New American Foundation calls the 35 guarantee agencies that currently administer student loans inefficient middlemen that waste taxpayer money. An overview of the report appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education can be found here.

While many are critical of the current system, some smaller schools have concerns about the new program. It could cost some institutions hundreds of thousands of dollars, adding to demands for resources as colleges are already grappling with a bad economy. Retraining of staff, acquiring new software, and hiring new employees are just some of the costs that colleges could incur if the plan is passed. Click here to read more about the impact on smaller colleges and universities.

While many in Congress, including Rep. George Miller of California, the Democratic chairman of the education committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, support the plan, others haven’t given up on the guaranteed-loan program. Read more here about Rep. Miller's proposed legislation and here about opposition to the new plan. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Washington — Congress has yet to decide whether to adopt President Obama’s proposal to end the bank-based guaranteed-loan program and move all colleges to direct lending by the 2010-11 academic year. But the U.S. Education Department is already preparing for just such a transition.

Mr. Obama has said the government would save $4-billion annually by eliminating the guaranteed-loan program — which provides government subsidies to banks that issue the loans — and moving all colleges to the direct-loan program, under which the Education Department issues loans directly to students through their colleges. The president plans to use the savings to bolster the popular Pell Grant program, which provides money to low-income students.

On Wednesday the department began sending letters to colleges outlining steps it is taking to ease the switch to direct lending.

Congress is set to decide on the president’s proposal this month. Several Republicans have voiced strong opposition to the plan, saying it would cost thousands of jobs and prevent colleges from choosing among competing loan programs. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

When the new GI Bill kicks in Aug. 1, the government's best-known education program for veterans will get the biggest boost since its World War II-era creation. But the benefit is hardly the "Government Issue," one-size-fits-all standard the name implies.

In fact, depending on where service members and veterans decide to attend college, they could receive a full ride, or very little.

An Associated Press review of state-by-state benefits under the new bill shows huge discrepancies in the amount veterans can receive.

For example:

Veterans attending New Hampshire colleges like Dartmouth might get $25,000 from the government each year, and in Dartmouth's case essentially a free ride, thanks to an additional grant from the Ivy League school. But in neighboring Massachusetts, it is a different story. At that state's numerous private schools — many just as expensive as Dartmouth — the government's baseline tuition benefit is only about $2,200 a year.

Veterans who choose a private school in Texas could get close to $20,000 a semester from the government for a typical course load. Those picking schools in California will get nothing for tuition.

The explanation stems from the formula the government created, as well as a much-criticized decision by the Department of Veterans Affairs on how to implement the law. The new GI Bill covers full in-state undergraduate tuition and fees at any public college. That's far more generous than the old GI Bill, which provides a monthly stipend that is the same from state to state. But Congress also wanted to help veterans attend often pricier private schools. So the new bill offers them an amount equal to the tuition at the most expensive public college in the same state. That penalizes veterans going to private colleges in states that have kept their public university tuition low.

About 80 percent of veterans tapping the new bill are expected to attend public institutions. But some of the remaining 20 percent — those planning to attend private colleges, graduate schools, and the for-profit institutions that are hugely popular with veterans — are angry. [San Francisco Chronicle]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Washington — Congress has approved a bill to patch holes in the Higher Education Act, including a glitch that would have forced thousands of veterans to return federal student aid they had been awarded for the coming academic year.

The House passed the measure for a second time yesterday because the Senate version of the bill added a scholarship program providing the maximum Pell Grant award to any student who had a parent die while on active military duty in Iraq or Afghanistan. Both the House and Senate approved the measure unanimously.

The legislation, which President Obama is expected to sign, would allow loan-guarantee agencies to sell rehabilitated student loans to the Education Department, a policy that had appeared in the version of the bill the House passed in March. The change would allow thousands of borrowers who have been stuck in default to escape from their debt and clear their credit histories.

The bill also would ensure that the Education Department’s “experimental site” program will continue for another year. The program allows participating financial-aid offices to use experimental approaches when awarding aid to students, with a goal of identifying innovative approaches that would work for the entire federal student-aid program. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

June 25, 2009

WASHINGTON -- Like many a politician, Education Secretary Arne Duncan is at his best when he's talking off the cuff.

"This damn form was killing us," Duncan said to a small group of reporters after a more formal presentation Wednesday to the White House press corps about the Obama administration's plan to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. He was talking about how big a deterrent the federal form was to getting students from low-income families to apply to college, when Duncan, as superintendent of Chicago's public schools throughout this decade, was trying to increase the district's college-going rates.

As Duncan and the Education Department trumpeted the proposal Wednesday with the high-profile appearance at the White House, along with IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman, the information they provided left many details to be determined. It seems clear, though, that as with many policy initiatives important to Obama, the administration seems intent on making forward progress even if it can't go as far as some think it should. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," Obama has taken to saying about health care and other matters, and the administration's approach on FAFSA simplification seems to follow that approach, too.

As Duncan laid out the plan Wednesday, the Education Department will, right now, make several changes that do not require Congressional approval. This summer, the department will take advantage of existing technology on the Web-based FAFSA to allow married or independent students to skip questions about their parents, among others. In January, the department will stop requiring students with low incomes to answer questions about their financial assets, and only returning students will be asked about prior drug convictions, since the question does not affect first-year students. Department officials said they would work closely with state officials to set up the electronic form to "make it easier to answer questions that the states need but the federal government does not."

Other changes the department seeks would require Congressional approval. Department officials said they would ask Congress to eliminate a total of 29 questions about students' and families' finances that are not on the federal tax form. Several of those relate to families' assets ("As of today, what is the net worth of your (and spouse’s) investments, including real estate (not your home)?"), and eliminating the consideration of assets for most students by abandoning those questions would be among the more controversial steps the Obama plan calls for. [Inside Higher Ed]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Washington — The bill to finance continuing U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan includes a provision that would extend educational benefits for children of members of the military who die while on active duty.

The educational provision would guarantee a full scholarship at an in-state public college for all children of soldiers killed on duty, according to a news release issued by Rep. Chet Edwards, a Democrat of Texas, who wrote the provision. Those who qualify could also apply the cost of a scholarship at their most expensive in-state public college toward the cost of attending an out-of-state or private college.

Under the current GI bill, service members can transfer their education benefits to only one dependent. The new bill would extend the benefit to all children of soldiers killed on duty. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Washington — The U.S. Education Department’s Internet-security features fail to protect confidential, personal information held on its Web sites, says the department’s Office of Inspector General in an audit report released today.

The portion of the report that is available to the public does not name specific departmental Web sites, so it is unclear whether those holding confidential student information are properly secured. For instance, the student-aid Web site has password-protected records of student finances that are used to determine eligibility for federal grants. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Washington — Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon of California will give up his post as the top Republican on the House education committee to become the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, Congress Daily reports.

His departure will create a vacancy at the top of the education committee at a time when the panel is considering legislation to overhaul the federal student-loan programs and make Pell Grants an entitlement.

While a successor for the education post has not been picked, the next in line for the job, in terms of seniority, is Rep. Thomas E. Petri of Wisconsin, an avid supporter of direct lending. Mr. Petri has been a member of the committee since 1979 and helped create the direct-loan program in the 1990s.

If Mr. Petri replaces Mr. McKeon, the committee’s Democrats could face less opposition from Republicans to President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the guaranteed-student-loan program. Congress has until mid-October to decide whether to abolish the bank-based program or make less drastic changes in student lending. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Nearly two years after being indicted, a former admissions director at Touro College, in New York, was found guilty on Tuesday of forging student transcripts and granting undeserved degrees in exchange for cash, the New York Daily News reports.

Andrique Baron, 36, sold degrees, including master’s degrees to three city teachers, for up to $25,000 each and deleted the names of actual students from college records in order to create transcripts for buyers.

A jury in Manhattan convicted Mr. Baron on 36 counts, and he now faces a sentence of up to 16 years in prison. He rejected a deal last year that would have resulted in only five years of jail time.

Mr. Baron was one of 10 people caught in a cash-for-grades scandal at the college in July 2007. They were charged with crimes of computer trespass, computer tampering, and falsifying business records. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

College officials need to begin planning now to comply with a new federal requirement that they post on their Web sites within roughly two years the net price to attend their institutions, panelists said at a meeting of institutional researchers here this week. 'This is going to end up being more complex as you get into it than people realize,' Mary M. Sapp, assistant vice president for planning and institutional research at the University of Miami, told members of the Association for Institutional Research. Congress mandated the new feature last year to give prospective students a clear idea of the actual cost to attend each institution. The net figure will be derived from total cost - tuition, fees, room, board, and other expenses - minus average aid from all sources of grants (but not loans). [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Distance educators won’t have to become FBI-style investigators, scanning fingerprints and installing cameras in the apartments of online students to ensure that people are who they say they are.

At least not yet.

The recently reauthorized Higher Education Act required accreditors to monitor the steps that colleges take to verify that an enrolled student is the same person who does the work. The language in the law had left distance educators worried they would have to buy expensive technology to ensure that students didn’t have other people take their tests. The distance educators feared the cost could be so high that programs would be in danger.

But proposed federal regulations about implementing the law, worked out this May, would allow colleges to satisfy the mandate with techniques like secure log-ins and passwords or proctored examinations, according to people involved in the negotiations.

Still, while colleges may have dodged an immediate bullet, what had been more of a “back burner” issue will now be “front and center,” Mr. Lokken said. In the future, as identity-verification technology evolves, the expectation is that accrediting agencies will require more than simple log-ins and pass codes. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Washington — Colleges often complain that they are overburdened with well-meaning but costly and duplicative federal regulations. Now they have a chance to do something about it.

The Higher Education Act that Congress reauthorized last year more than doubled colleges’ reporting requirements, but it also required a study of redundant and unnecessary regulations. The law put the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, an independent panel that advises Congress, in charge of the study.

Now the committee has created a Web site where the public can offer recommendations for streamlining federal student-aid regulations. Priority will be given to comments received before July 15. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]