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

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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]

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A group of distance education leaders today plans to discuss how current state-by-state approval and licensing protocols are hampering online colleges, and how those policies might evolve to accommodate colleges that educate students in many different states via the Web. “American labor’s competitive edge requires work force education that avoids entanglement of online and distance educational providers in a duplicative web of processes in order to offer their services,” says a report from a task force assigned by the forum to study the issue.

That report is expected to be the focus of today’s meeting here. Its authors argue that the state-based approval system is centered around the notion that colleges are fixed in a single location that necessarily falls within the borders of a state. Since online colleges aim to teach students in multiple states, they have to go through multiple accreditation processes to achieve a nationwide presence, then satisfy various bureaucratic requirements in each state if they want to keep teaching students there.

This, says John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College (which founded the Presidents’ Forum), can be “sort of a pain in the butt"; more to the point, it forces online institutions to devote a lot of time and resources to acquiring and maintaining licensure in different states. This, the task force argues, “increasingly may act to inhibit student access to essential learning opportunities and at an unnecessarily high cost.”

To remove these anchors from the necks of online colleges seeking a presence in each state, the task force proposes that regional accrediting organizations and their member states reach a common ground on “a specific template of state standards to which all parties would reference their individual requirements.” Under such a system, online colleges would only have to seek the approval of a single accrediting organization and a single state, just like brick-and-mortar colleges -- except they would get to enroll students from all over the country. The system would be based on “reciprocal judgment"; that is, state governments and regional accreditors would have to trust each other that their accredited institutions were on the level.

Solving the discontinuity between state licensing agencies could be the key to getting regional accreditors to trust one another’s judgment, according to Alan Contreras, administrator of the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization. If professional licensing agencies in different states can align their standards, curricula designed to prepare students to meet those standards will necessarily become more similar, Contreras wrote in an outline for a talk he is planning to give today at the Presidents' Forum meeting. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed into law a bill that reinstates California's Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, which regulates for-profit colleges. The state has depended on a temporary regulatory process since 2007, when the bureau expired after lawmakers failed to agree on how to reorganize it. Under the new law, the bureau will take responsibility for reviewing the institutions' financial affairs, faculty qualifications, and facilities before granting them approval. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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Financial-aid officials dislike the U.S. House of Representatives' plan to eliminate the Perkins loan's in-school interest subsidy, the proposed allocation formula, and the requirement that colleges provide matching funds, a new survey by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators has found. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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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]