The House of Representatives proposed changes and additions to the Higher Education Act last Friday that will affect students in many areas, including illegal downloading, student fees, accreditation practices and student loans.
The Higher Education Act is due for renewal and any legislation enacted will determine higher education policy for the next five years. The bill was originally created in 1965 to strengthen educational resources available to colleges and universities and to provide financial assistance to students.
The Senate passed its version of the bill in July. The House proposed its initial version of the bill last week, which was marked up in the Education Committee on Wednesday.
A change that will directly impact students is the crackdown on illegal downloading within the proposed legislation. It requires institutions to educate their students on policies regarding copyright infringement on campus networks. It also requires that colleges eligible for federal financial aid under Title IV, a section of the Higher Education Act that defines all federal loans available to students, to develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading,
“About 44 percent of domestic piracy losses nationwide, over $500 million, are due to college students,” said Kori Bernard, a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America, which supports the legislation.
“We are requesting minimally invasive efforts to reduce piracy on college campuses,” Bernard added.
Educause, a nonprofit organization concerned with proper technology use in higher education, called the second portion of the legislation “unacceptable,” according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“These provisions of the bill are misdirected at higher education,” said Steven Worona, Educause director of policy and networking programs.
Most infringement by college students occurs on commercial networks that are not associated with their college. Less than 4 percent of infringers are using college campus networks and therefore account for no more than 9 percent of the losses. The statistic that attributes 44 percent of piracy to college campuses is both misleading and false, Worona said.
“Campuses are already attacking this problem as aggressively as possible. The source of the problem should be targeted and that’s not higher education,” Worona said.
In their separate proposals, both the Senate and the House agreed on modifications to the act, including allowing the Secretary of Education to establish a Higher Education Price Index in order to identify colleges whose tuition and fees are unusually high and place them on a watch list.
The House went beyond the Senate, mandating that colleges on the watch list submit a report explaining the reasons for their unusually high fees, and outlining steps that will be taken to prevent future increases in fees, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
To create further incentives to prevent fee increases, the House also proposed offering additional grant money to colleges that restrained their tuition growth, said Rachel Racusen, spokeswoman for Representative George Miller of California, who is chairman of the House Education and Labor committee. States would also be punished for cutting their higher education budgets.
“States that fail to meet the mandated standards would risk losing these funds,” Racusen said. States faced with fiscal difficulties would be eligible for a waiver from the Secretary of Education.
“To expand college access to millions of students and families and to ensure that our higher education system operates in the best interest of helping students attend and pay for college is a top priority of Miller’s office,” Racusen said.
Congress is also addressing is the 90-10 rule, which requires career colleges, which provide vocational educations, to receive at least 10 percent of their revenue from sources other than federal student aid in order to be eligible for the financial aid benefits of Title IV.
“A minority of these schools were diploma mills that took advantage of students and were not legitimate institutions,” said Harris N. Miller, chairman of the Career College Association.
Currently, these institutions are subject to stringent accreditation requirements. At the same time, their student population has grown from about 2 percent of higher education students in 1995, to about 10 percent today, Miller said.
The new legislation modifies the act to broaden the sources that can comprise the 10 percent of non-governmental funding to include scholarships and existing short-term educational programs.
Miller said he is optimistic that the resulting bill will remove unnecessary restrictions.
“Schools are being forced to artificially raise tuition to meet the 10 percent standard, creating a situation where tuition is being raised only to meet bureaucratic requirements,” Miller said.
In terms of accreditation, both the Senate and the House aim to hold colleges more responsible for evidence of student achievement and to make accreditation practices more transparent, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Almost 40 percent of students that receive degrees from traditional school have transferred from one college to another, but many schools are ripping off their students by forcing them to take the same classes twice,” Miller said.
Colleges have adopted voluntary policies stating that the source of accreditation should not be the sole basis for an applicant’s rejection, but blatant violations of these self-imposed rules are frequent, Miller said.
The bill requires that accreditation practices be made publicly available.
“This is a partial victory, and a major step forward,” Miller said.
The proposed legislation also attempts to reduce student expenditures by revamping student loan practices.The Senate and the House are aiming to reduce conflicts of interest within the student loan industry between lenders and colleges by outlawing questionable practices and increasing transparency, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Colleges that recommend preferred lenders must include at least three unaffiliated providers for government-backed loans and two other providers for private lenders. In addition, annual reports justifying choices and criteria for selections must be submitted to the Secretary of Education.
Revenue-sharing between colleges and lenders, and “co-branding,” or allowing lenders to use a college’s mascot in marketing materials, will be banned under the new legislation.
A top priority of Rep. George Miller’s office is to make information available to students and their families to help them understand the financial opportunities available to them, spokeswoman Racusen said.
Showing posts with label Scholarship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scholarship. Show all posts
11/20/2007
Warning on Tuition, Shift on Accreditation
If the Higher Education Act bill that House Democrats introduced late last week did not persuade college leaders that the issue of college prices is and will remain front and center on the federal policy agenda, the House education committee’s consideration of the legislation Wednesday should once and for all.
Lawmakers on the Education and Labor Committee did not complete their work on the measure (H.R. 4137) Wednesday, though they did pass several amendments and reject or withdraw numerous others (detailed below). But their hours of mostly bipartisan discussion about the legislation included warnings from members of both political parties that colleges will face continuing scrutiny of their spending and tuition prices and could face more federal intrusion into their operations — beyond the creation of federal “watch lists” that the bill in question would create — if they don’t get the problem under control.
Rep. Michael Castle (R-Del.) proposed an amendment that would have required colleges that appear on the “watch lists” to put in place procedures to cut their costs and slash their federal student aid funds by 10 percent a year if they do not meet certain benchmarks. Castle said he believed the committee’s bill would do “very good things” on the cost issue, but suggested that “more may need to be done.”
Castle ultimately withdrew his amendment, as aides said he had been planning to do all along. But the committee’s chairman, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), said he found Castle’s amendment to be “very tempting,” and acknowledged the Republican lawmaker’s point that “we haven’t done everything potentially available” to Congress to crack down on rising college costs.
Miller then issued a warning directly to college officials: “I hope the [higher education] community is listening closely on this,” he said, adding that the committee’s work on this bill “is not the end of the story.”
The issue of college prices and the need for colleges to rein them was raised on and off throughout the hours of debate, offering a rare bit of cohesion to a discussion that was, like the sprawling 747-page bill under consideration, all over the place. (An accounting of what was contained in the original bill can be found here.)
Perhaps the most significant development, which occurred late Wednesday evening after the hearing room had partially cleared out, involved the contentious topic of how student learning outcomes should be assessed in the accreditation process. The bill proposed by committee Democrats last week would give colleges and universities themselves the authority to define how to measure “success with respect to student achievement in relation to the institution’s mission.” That is in contrast to the Education Department’s push during last winter’s negotiated rule making session on accreditation to put that authority much more in the hands of the accrediting agencies. The original language in the House bill largely mirrored that in the Higher Education Act bill passed by the Senate this summer.
Wednesday evening, Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) — acting at the urging of regional and national accreditors, who reportedly felt that the bill’s language threatened to undermine their authority — introduced an amendment to strip the language that empowered each college to define student learning for itself. (Language in the Higher Education Act as it stands now is noncommittal about who has that authority.) With virtually no discussion, and a promise to bring forward replacement language in the coming days, Miller and the committee’s other leaders adopted Andrews’s amendment without dissent.
College leaders, who had fought the Education Department’s push, said they were blindsided by the Andrews amendment. They were furious, saying the shift would open the door to federal officials renewing their effort to compel to force colleges to measure and report more quantitative data about their success in educating students. The turnabout revealed anew a rift between accreditors and college leaders that surfaced during the accreditation negotiations.
“I’m shocked at the stupidity of the accreditors in opening up an issue that had been settled in a positive way,” said Becky Timmons, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education. Matt Owens, assistant director of federal relations at the Association of American Universities, said the change — should it stand — could be a deal breaker. “Removal of the provision seriously jeopardizes our ability to support the bill,” Owens said.
The panel considered several other amendments related to accreditation as well. It adopted one amendment that would require accrediting agencies to “respect” the missions of religiously affiliated institutions, which several civil rights groups opposed because they said it would make it easier for such institutions to discriminate on the basis of race or sexual orientation. It also embraced a proposal, offered by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), that would allow the minority party in Congress to appoint some of the new members of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, the panel that reviews accreditors and that the Higher Education Act renewal bill would reconfigure. (Currently the education secretary appoints all 15 members; the original House bill would give the Senate, the House and the Education Department five appointees each, while Hoekstra’s measure would give the Senate and House six each, with three appointed by each party.)
Rep. Thomas Petri (R-Wisc.) withdrew an amendment that would have allowed colleges, once they had been accredited by a federally recognized agency, to opt out of the re-accreditation process by submitting a slew of information about its performance and fiscal and other health to the federal government. (The Petri amendment was strikingly similar to proposals that have been made by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, whose president, Anne D. Neal, happens to be married to the Congressman and a member of the Education Department’s accreditation advisory committee.) Another withdrawn amendment related to accreditation would have ended a requirement that accrediting agencies get approval from the U.S. Education Department when they seek to begin reviewing distance learning institutions.
In other areas, the House panel adopted amendments that would:
* Bar the Education Department from developing or implementing a federal “unit records” database, which would track information about students from elementary and secondary school through their entry into the work force. Many states have such systems, but private colleges (and many Republican lawmakers) have opposed the development of a national system, mostly on privacy grounds.
* Create a new assistant secretary position in the U.S. Education Department to oversee international education.
* Ease in several ways the requirements of a federal law that forces for-profit colleges to garner at least 10 percent of their revenues from sources other than the federal student aid programs. One change would allow the institutions to count institutional scholarships, or tuition discounts, in the 10 percent total; another would soften the potential penalties violators can face.
* Change how the Education Department calculates the “cohort” default rate for student loans.
Numerous other amendments were rejected or withdrawn by their authors. Some of those amendments would have:
* Required colleges that participate in the federal direct student loan program to process loans for students through banks or other lenders in the guaranteed loan program.
* Expressed the sense of Congress that students should not have their free speech rights infringed by faculty members or fellow students — a watered-down version, essentially, of David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights.
The House panel will reconvene this morning to vote on a handful of amendments and approval of the overall bill.
— Doug Lederman
The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/15/hea.
Lawmakers on the Education and Labor Committee did not complete their work on the measure (H.R. 4137) Wednesday, though they did pass several amendments and reject or withdraw numerous others (detailed below). But their hours of mostly bipartisan discussion about the legislation included warnings from members of both political parties that colleges will face continuing scrutiny of their spending and tuition prices and could face more federal intrusion into their operations — beyond the creation of federal “watch lists” that the bill in question would create — if they don’t get the problem under control.
Rep. Michael Castle (R-Del.) proposed an amendment that would have required colleges that appear on the “watch lists” to put in place procedures to cut their costs and slash their federal student aid funds by 10 percent a year if they do not meet certain benchmarks. Castle said he believed the committee’s bill would do “very good things” on the cost issue, but suggested that “more may need to be done.”
Castle ultimately withdrew his amendment, as aides said he had been planning to do all along. But the committee’s chairman, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), said he found Castle’s amendment to be “very tempting,” and acknowledged the Republican lawmaker’s point that “we haven’t done everything potentially available” to Congress to crack down on rising college costs.
Miller then issued a warning directly to college officials: “I hope the [higher education] community is listening closely on this,” he said, adding that the committee’s work on this bill “is not the end of the story.”
The issue of college prices and the need for colleges to rein them was raised on and off throughout the hours of debate, offering a rare bit of cohesion to a discussion that was, like the sprawling 747-page bill under consideration, all over the place. (An accounting of what was contained in the original bill can be found here.)
Perhaps the most significant development, which occurred late Wednesday evening after the hearing room had partially cleared out, involved the contentious topic of how student learning outcomes should be assessed in the accreditation process. The bill proposed by committee Democrats last week would give colleges and universities themselves the authority to define how to measure “success with respect to student achievement in relation to the institution’s mission.” That is in contrast to the Education Department’s push during last winter’s negotiated rule making session on accreditation to put that authority much more in the hands of the accrediting agencies. The original language in the House bill largely mirrored that in the Higher Education Act bill passed by the Senate this summer.
Wednesday evening, Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) — acting at the urging of regional and national accreditors, who reportedly felt that the bill’s language threatened to undermine their authority — introduced an amendment to strip the language that empowered each college to define student learning for itself. (Language in the Higher Education Act as it stands now is noncommittal about who has that authority.) With virtually no discussion, and a promise to bring forward replacement language in the coming days, Miller and the committee’s other leaders adopted Andrews’s amendment without dissent.
College leaders, who had fought the Education Department’s push, said they were blindsided by the Andrews amendment. They were furious, saying the shift would open the door to federal officials renewing their effort to compel to force colleges to measure and report more quantitative data about their success in educating students. The turnabout revealed anew a rift between accreditors and college leaders that surfaced during the accreditation negotiations.
“I’m shocked at the stupidity of the accreditors in opening up an issue that had been settled in a positive way,” said Becky Timmons, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education. Matt Owens, assistant director of federal relations at the Association of American Universities, said the change — should it stand — could be a deal breaker. “Removal of the provision seriously jeopardizes our ability to support the bill,” Owens said.
The panel considered several other amendments related to accreditation as well. It adopted one amendment that would require accrediting agencies to “respect” the missions of religiously affiliated institutions, which several civil rights groups opposed because they said it would make it easier for such institutions to discriminate on the basis of race or sexual orientation. It also embraced a proposal, offered by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), that would allow the minority party in Congress to appoint some of the new members of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, the panel that reviews accreditors and that the Higher Education Act renewal bill would reconfigure. (Currently the education secretary appoints all 15 members; the original House bill would give the Senate, the House and the Education Department five appointees each, while Hoekstra’s measure would give the Senate and House six each, with three appointed by each party.)
Rep. Thomas Petri (R-Wisc.) withdrew an amendment that would have allowed colleges, once they had been accredited by a federally recognized agency, to opt out of the re-accreditation process by submitting a slew of information about its performance and fiscal and other health to the federal government. (The Petri amendment was strikingly similar to proposals that have been made by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, whose president, Anne D. Neal, happens to be married to the Congressman and a member of the Education Department’s accreditation advisory committee.) Another withdrawn amendment related to accreditation would have ended a requirement that accrediting agencies get approval from the U.S. Education Department when they seek to begin reviewing distance learning institutions.
In other areas, the House panel adopted amendments that would:
* Bar the Education Department from developing or implementing a federal “unit records” database, which would track information about students from elementary and secondary school through their entry into the work force. Many states have such systems, but private colleges (and many Republican lawmakers) have opposed the development of a national system, mostly on privacy grounds.
* Create a new assistant secretary position in the U.S. Education Department to oversee international education.
* Ease in several ways the requirements of a federal law that forces for-profit colleges to garner at least 10 percent of their revenues from sources other than the federal student aid programs. One change would allow the institutions to count institutional scholarships, or tuition discounts, in the 10 percent total; another would soften the potential penalties violators can face.
* Change how the Education Department calculates the “cohort” default rate for student loans.
Numerous other amendments were rejected or withdrawn by their authors. Some of those amendments would have:
* Required colleges that participate in the federal direct student loan program to process loans for students through banks or other lenders in the guaranteed loan program.
* Expressed the sense of Congress that students should not have their free speech rights infringed by faculty members or fellow students — a watered-down version, essentially, of David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights.
The House panel will reconvene this morning to vote on a handful of amendments and approval of the overall bill.
— Doug Lederman
The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/15/hea.
11/10/2007
Safe harbors for your money, legislation, Free Stuff Friday, Planet of Women
Student Financial Aid News
+ Inside Higher Ed: Democratic leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives failed to muster enough votes Thursday in support of a 2008 spending bill for education and health programs to override a certain veto by President Bush. Fifty-one Republicans joined 223 Democrats in voting for the appropriations measure for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Labor and Related Agencies, but that’s short of the necessary two-thirds. The bill would increase the maximum Pell Grant to $4,925 in 2008 and increase spending on the National Institutes of Health by $1 billion, to $30 billion. But President Bush and Republican critics say the bill spends irresponsibly.
+ It was pointed out at MASFAA yesterday that the current bill is $22 billion over the President’s budget; prior budgets during the Republican controlled Congress were $55 billion over and there was no problem approving those…
+ Interesting read on the Chronicle about the growth of private student loans
+ Asked by The Chronicle if Education Secretary Margaret Spellings had seen significant evidence of either layoffs or benefit reductions, the secretary answered during a conference call with reporters last week: “I’ve heard about some layoffs and maybe have seen some press about it, but no.” Asked again if she has seen any evidence even of students facing higher costs, she added: “No, have not.”
+ Which newspapers does she read, I wonder?
+ Federal student loan consolidation benefits across the board have been wiped out - those benefits used to save students tens of thousands of dollars on the life of a loan, and are no longer available from anyone
+ Followup piece and quote from TheStreet.com: “The hard part is figuring out what you own,” says James Holtzman, adviser and shareholder at Legend Financial Advisors. He says more than a few clients have inquired about whether or not their money market fund has exposure to subprime or any mortgage-backed debt.
+ Holtzman says he’s not opposed to recommending investors move to a “garbage-free” money market account, earn just over 4%, and wait this out for the next 18 months.
+ “Cash isn’t a bad thing at different points in the market cycle, and this is one of them,” he says.
+ FDIC savings accounts at places like ING Direct can give you relatively modest but safe returns, backed by FDIC insurance up to $100,000
+ Talk to a financial planner, do your research, and be careful out there!
Scholarship Update
+ The Association of Food and Drug Officials (AFDO) is an international, nonprofit organization whose members are concerned with the development and enforcement of uniform food, drug and other consumer protection laws.
+ The recipients should have demonstrated a desire to serve in a career of research, regulatory work, quality control, or teaching in an area related to some aspect of foods, drugs or consumer product safety; should have demonstrated leadership capabilities; and must have at least a 3.5 grade point average during the first two years of undergraduate study.
+ Two awards for $1,500
+ February 1 deadline
+ Details at our free college scholarship search site
+ Inside Higher Ed: Democratic leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives failed to muster enough votes Thursday in support of a 2008 spending bill for education and health programs to override a certain veto by President Bush. Fifty-one Republicans joined 223 Democrats in voting for the appropriations measure for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Labor and Related Agencies, but that’s short of the necessary two-thirds. The bill would increase the maximum Pell Grant to $4,925 in 2008 and increase spending on the National Institutes of Health by $1 billion, to $30 billion. But President Bush and Republican critics say the bill spends irresponsibly.
+ It was pointed out at MASFAA yesterday that the current bill is $22 billion over the President’s budget; prior budgets during the Republican controlled Congress were $55 billion over and there was no problem approving those…
+ Interesting read on the Chronicle about the growth of private student loans
+ Asked by The Chronicle if Education Secretary Margaret Spellings had seen significant evidence of either layoffs or benefit reductions, the secretary answered during a conference call with reporters last week: “I’ve heard about some layoffs and maybe have seen some press about it, but no.” Asked again if she has seen any evidence even of students facing higher costs, she added: “No, have not.”
+ Which newspapers does she read, I wonder?
+ Federal student loan consolidation benefits across the board have been wiped out - those benefits used to save students tens of thousands of dollars on the life of a loan, and are no longer available from anyone
+ Followup piece and quote from TheStreet.com: “The hard part is figuring out what you own,” says James Holtzman, adviser and shareholder at Legend Financial Advisors. He says more than a few clients have inquired about whether or not their money market fund has exposure to subprime or any mortgage-backed debt.
+ Holtzman says he’s not opposed to recommending investors move to a “garbage-free” money market account, earn just over 4%, and wait this out for the next 18 months.
+ “Cash isn’t a bad thing at different points in the market cycle, and this is one of them,” he says.
+ FDIC savings accounts at places like ING Direct can give you relatively modest but safe returns, backed by FDIC insurance up to $100,000
+ Talk to a financial planner, do your research, and be careful out there!
Scholarship Update
+ The Association of Food and Drug Officials (AFDO) is an international, nonprofit organization whose members are concerned with the development and enforcement of uniform food, drug and other consumer protection laws.
+ The recipients should have demonstrated a desire to serve in a career of research, regulatory work, quality control, or teaching in an area related to some aspect of foods, drugs or consumer product safety; should have demonstrated leadership capabilities; and must have at least a 3.5 grade point average during the first two years of undergraduate study.
+ Two awards for $1,500
+ February 1 deadline
+ Details at our free college scholarship search site
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