The House Committee on Education and the Workforce released a comprehensive bill Friday to reauthorize the Higher Education Act (HEA), last renewed in 2008.
The bill includes many of the recommendations of the 2015 report of the bipartisan Task Force on Federal Regulation of Higher Education.
These steps will simplify and streamline federal mandates and help
campuses reduce administrative costs and better serve students.
The legislation also incorporates a number of
other proposals long sought by higher education, including providing a
bonus to Pell Grant recipients to incentivize completion, simplifying
the process of applying for federal aid, eliminating origination fees on
student loans, consolidating loan repayment to two options, and
allowing institutions the authority to limit borrowing.
However, ACE President Ted Mitchell expressed deep concern in a statement
Friday that overall, the proposal would undermine decades of federal
policy aimed at helping students at the undergraduate and graduate level
afford a high-quality higher education. Most notably, this measure
would immediately lead to higher interest charges every year for some
six million student borrowers and eliminate 1.5 million financial aid
grants.
“Reauthorization of this landmark law is
overdue, but it is vital to undertake this complicated process in a way
that does not undermine access to and the quality of postsecondary
education at a time when the nation needs more of both,” Mitchell said
in the statement.
And in many cases, worthwhile proposals in
the bill are offset by other changes that would add burden and
complexity, to the detriment of students and institutions. For instance,
mandating weekly or monthly disbursals of student aid would complicate
the management of the financial aid process and require institutions to
move from two to as many as 50 disbursements in a year.
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) chair of the House
education committee, intends to mark up the bill in the next couple
weeks, but it is unclear when the measure might reach the House floor.
For more on the House HEA bill, see these stories in The Wall Street Journal, Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education. For an ACE-prepared summary of the bill, click here (323 KB PDF).
Meanwhile in the Senate, the Health,
Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee is expected to work on
its version of an HEA reauthorization bill on a bipartisan basis and
release it next year. The committee held a hearing Nov. 28 on
“Reauthorizing the Higher Education Act: Examining Proposals to Simplify
the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.”
Both Chair Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Ranking
Member Patty Murray (D-WA) used the hearing to signal their HEA
reauthorization priorities.
In his opening remarks, Alexander noted, “My
central focus will be to make it simpler and easier for students to
apply for federal aid and to pay their loans back and easier for college
administrators to cut through the jungle of bureaucratic red tape.” In
her remarks, Murray laid out four key areas that HEA will need to
address: the increasing costs of college; college accountability and
student success; addressing barriers for working families, students of
color, and first generation students attending colleges; and threats to a
safe learning environment. Alexander said he would be introducing new
legislation soon to simplify the FAFSA by incorporating tax information
already shared by families with the federal government.
An archived webcast of the hearing can be found here.