New England Board of Higher Education » Government Accountability Office

DC Shuttle: Gainful Employment and Other Higher Ed News from Washington

John O. Harney — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:51:51 +0000

The U.S. Education Department is going ahead with its proposed "gainful employment" rules for for-profit colleges, despite industry advocates calling on Congress and the courts to intervene. Originally scheduled to be issued last September, Education Secretary Arne Duncan delayed the regulations after receiving about 90,000 letters on the issue, most of them in opposition. The most recent version of the regulations, which would make federal funding to for-profit institutions conditional on their meeting several metrics based on academic quality and graduates' ability to repay student loans, was sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on May 2 for review. The Department of Education is already planning to form another negotiated rulemaking committee, although it has not indicated a possible subject for the proposed rulemaking. Roundtable discussions and hearings this month will address teacher preparation, improving college completion, and student loans.

The U.S. Department of Justice is joining a whistle-blower lawsuit against Education Management Corp. for alleged illegal student recruitment practices at its for-profit colleges. The suit, brought in federal court in Pittsburgh, PA, alleges that Education Management paid incentives to its college recruiters based on how many students they enrolled. Education Management is the second-largest operator of for-profit colleges, covering more than 148,000 students around the country. The Education Department has been pursuing stricter regulations on for-profit colleges since 2009, and new rules are scheduled to go into effect in July. These rules would, among other measures, remove 12 exceptions to the prohibition against incentive payment to college recruiters.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on Thursday detailing problems with the implementation of the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The Department of Veterans Affairs was charged with implementing the program which was expanded significantly in its last authorization, and the GAO report concluded that it could have worked more closely with the Education Department and other parties. College officials have noted several of the issues address in the GAO report, including the long delays often involved in processing a veteran's benefits.

A survey of correctional facilities in 43 states found that only 6% of prisoners were enrolled in vocational or postsecondary academic programs during the 2009-10 school year, and 86% of those enrolled were concentrated in 13 states. The survey, conducted by the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, argued that increasing prison access to educational programs could reduce recidivism and in turn reduce the country's prison costs—around $52 billion per year for 2.3 million prisoners, according to the survey. It also recommends that "federal and state statutes should be amended to make specific categories of incarcerated persons eligible for financial aid." Prisoner enrollment in continuing education dropped off sharply following a 1994 law making federal and state prisoners ineligible for Pell Grants.

In a proposal for a new national security and prosperity strategy, Captain Wayne Porter of the U.S. Navy and Colonel Mark Mykleby of the U.S. Marine Corps argued that supporting education is critical to maintaining our national security. They contend that investment in education, workforce development, and economic competitiveness is tantamount to investment in future international influence. "Our first investment priority, then, is intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health, and social services."

From the New England Council's Weekly Washington Report Higher Education Update, May 9, 2011. NEBHE is a member of the Council and will publish this column each week.

Founded in 1925, the New England Council is a non-partisan alliance of businesses, academic and health institutions, and public and private organizations throughout New England formed to promote economic growth and a high quality of life in the New England region. The Council's mission is to identify and support federal public policies and articulate the voice of its membership regionally and nationally on important issues facing New England. For more information, please visit www.newenglandcouncil.com.

The DC Shuttle: Higher Education News from Washington

John O. Harney — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:01:12 +0000

On Thursday, the House and Senate both passed a fiscal year 2011 budget compromise (H.R. 1473) which would make almost $40 billion in cuts to federal spending. The bill is much more restrained in its cuts to education programs than was the House Republicans’ spending legislation (H.R. 1) which passed the House in February. The Head Start program would receive a small increase over current funding levels and the competitive grants provided through Race to the Top would receive an additional $700 million. The Pell Grant program would maintain its current maximum award level of $5,550 for the 2011-12 school year and receive $23 billion in discretionary funds. In order to continue providing the same level of grant awards to a pool of students which is expected to increase as it has been for several years, students taking classes year-round would no longer be able to apply for a second grant in one year. College and student advocates claim that this cut, which would save an estimated $8 billion through 2012, disproportionately harms older students and those paying their own way through college. The bill would make significant cuts to some education programs and eliminate 27 others entirely. Teach for America and the Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnership (LEAP) program to support state-based aid for low-income students would both be eliminated, while the TRIO programs which help guide disadvantaged students through education from junior high to post-graduate levels would be cut by $25 million. Job training grants to states which would have been eliminated entirely under H.R. 1 would be cut by $182 million, and the bill would create a $125 million Workforce Innovation Fund for state and regional partnerships to improve current job training programs.

Republican members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee wrote a letter to Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) heavily criticizing his efforts to impose a set of regulations on for-profit colleges and universities. They requested that Sen. Harkin abandon his series of “disorganized and prejudicial” hearings and work with them toward reforms which would address all institutions of higher education. If not, the senators “will not participate in the next hearing on for-profit institutions,” which Sen. Harkin has scheduled for May 10. While Republican committee members concede that increases in student debt and “questionable student outcomes at many institutions of higher education” merit attention, they believe that Sen. Harkin and other supporters of the Education Department’s “gainful employment” regulations are using too blunt an instrument to address the problem. The HELP Committee chair has accused for-profit colleges of deceptive recruiting practices and burdening students with debt which they are unable to repay after graduation. A spokesperson for Sen. Harkin said that the chairman hopes to work with committee members from both parties to introduce legislation addressing concerns about the for-profit higher education sector.

On Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education held a hearing on a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on “Opportunities to Reduce Potential Duplication in Federal Teacher Quality Programs.” GAO Education, Workforce, and Income Security Issues Director George Scott reported that the GAO had “identified 82 programs supporting teacher quality which are characterized by fragmentation and overlap.” Subcommittee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) pointed out that the GAO report did not identify any programs that could definitively be characterized as “duplicative” and instead conservatively indicated areas where there was “potential duplication.” When Scott acknowledged that no evaluation had been done of the potential impacts of cutting or consolidating these programs, Congresswoman DeLauro requested that additional funding be appropriated to these programs in order to conduct thorough internal evaluations of their effectiveness so that federal funding can be directed more judiciously. Committee member Congressman Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) contended that while many of the programs have not been fully evaluated, some programs where there exists known fraud and waste, including Head Start, should be scaled back immediately.

From the New England Council's Weekly Washington Report Higher Education Update, April 18, 2011. NEBHE is a member of the Council and will publish this column each week.

Book Review: Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent

John O. Harney — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 12:00:41 +0000

Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning, Peter Smith, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2010

In 1970, I was a high school student in a suburban New England town. The invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State had brought spectacular illumination to the end of the academic year and dimmed hopes that the war in Vietnam would soon be over. But optimism and idealism left over from the 1960s still percolated in our midst. That summer, a group of students, aided by a few like-minded parents and educators, came up with the idea of setting up a “free school” in town over the vacation period. Free schools, which at the time were springing up in cities and college towns across the country, were intended to be places where education would finally be democratized; teachers and students would be equals, and the focus would be on real learning rather than meeting pre-established academic standards or simply earning credits. Thanks to several thousand dollars in start-up funding, provided with some reluctance by the school committee, our free school began and flourished, albeit only for an eight-week run, during which we had free use of parts of the high school. It attracted people who had knowledge to share and people, young and old, who wanted to learn. Courses ranged from radio electronics and cooking to rock climbing, foreign languages and simulation games.

Sadly, our free school never managed a second act. By the following summer, idealism had turned to cynicism and the first signs of the decade's economic malaise had begun to make officials more parsimonious and everyone perhaps less experimental. However, having witnessed this wondrous phenomenon, I never entirely let go of the idea that education could be done differently.

Peter Smith, the author of Harnessing America's Wasted Talent, also has had occasion to see education from different vantage points, thanks to a long and varied career in education and politics. Founding president of Community College of Vermont and California State University at Monterey Bay, Smith has also served as Vermont's lieutenant governor and as a Vermont congressman. In recent years, he has authored a slew of books serving up thoughtful critiques of American higher education along with nostrums rooted in his experience.

On a perhaps more controversial note, Smith currently serves as vice president of academic strategies and development at Kaplan University, one of more than a dozen for-profit institutions skewered by investigators of the Government Accountability Office for allegedly deceptive statements made to investigators pretending to be applicants. And for the most part, for-profits are anathema to mainstream educators.

Leaving aside any temptation to shoot the messenger, though, Smith's arguments come across as both persuasive and simple without being simplistic. His central thesis, what he calls his “Law of Thirds” is that higher education has done a generally good job of serving the needs of the “top” one-third of learners who have the means and/or the skills to access and navigate the formal structures of K-12 learning and the college world that follows. However, the remaining two-thirds of learners either never make it out of high school or graduate but do not go on to college. This, he says, is not good enough given that so much job growth is in fields requiring advanced skills.

The cure he proposes is not dismantling higher education, nor does he really fault the higher education “establishment.” Instead, he suggests that higher education is simply “maxed out” and cannot and should not be expected to solve the two-thirds problem by itself. It is what he characterizes as a cottage industry rather than a system—with each school issuing its own currency in the form of academic credits. Still, despite its faults, he is largely content to let much of the higher ed establishment do what it has been doing, often with great success.

What does need to change, he argues, is the notion that only traditional schools, traditional curriculum, traditional classrooms and traditional methods for assessing and awarding credit should remain as the only way to serve up education. Like the American automobile industry, which fattened on cheap petroleum and government subsidized highway and ignored foreign challenges for too long, the education establishment must recognize that change has arrived and a revolution is brewing, Smith writes.

With so many people effectively excluded from the benefits of higher education, with a deep and persistent need for more skilled and capable people in the workforce, and with unlimited quantities of information on the web and communication technologies that have grown ubiquitous and cheap, Smith says America can no longer wait for miracles that will never happen. He points out that the U.S. is the only developed nation where younger workers are less educated than older workers. Therefore, he suggests, educators must devise ways to recognize learning in all its form and engage learners from cradle to grave using more innovative methods and recognizing each individual’s personal learning capabilities.

One of the solutions he proposes is the creation of Colleges of the 21^st Century (C21C). Instead of focusing on exclusion—with admission standards as the gate—he says, “For the first time in history, we have the knowledge and the tools available to educate through new designs,” including “emerging information technology.”

C21Cs will, in his vision, thoroughly personalize learning, connecting it to all aspects of life and ensuring the mobility of credit and credentials so no one will be left out of the system. For example, C21Cs would find ways to identify and recognize learning done on the job, in the home and through leisure. The competent and intelligent people that often have crucial positions in our world—albeit without benefit of formal credentials—would be embraced and given opportunities to grow. In the end, he writes, “the new ecology of learning will change forever the balance of power between the learner and his or her learning.”

Smith’s vision of a democratized, wide-ranging and humanized education system is everything an idealist might hope for supplemented by plausible means of implementation that should satisfy the pragmatist. It will be interesting to see how far he gets.

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Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer.