Education. In the proposal, education was an area of investment, with the President recommending $71.2 billion in discretionary funding for the U.S. Department of Education, a 4.6 percent increase over 2012 spending. The budget proposal focused on three major areas –expanded preschool education programs, consolidation and enhancement of STEM programs and additional hiring of STEM teachers, and addressing the problem of aging school infrastructure.

Higher education. In the area of higher education, the President’s budget includes $1 billion for a college affordability competitive grant program, styled on the Race to the Top initiatives used in recent years to encourage improvement and innovation in K12 schools. The most significant policy element in the area of student financial aid is his proposal to peg student loan interest rates to the market, rather than having them set by Congress. This echoes a Republican proposal issued earlier this week that would tie student loan interest rates to three points above the ten-year Treasury yield. Obama’s version provides less detail. While this would provide near-term relief on student loan interest rates, including the pending Stafford loan jump slated for July 1, some commentators are concerned about the implications when market rates begin to rise again. In the president’s budget, Pell grants would remain funded at the current maximum, $5,645.

Obama’s budget includes a new $300 million High School Redesign competitive grant program for districts that partner with colleges, businesses, and nonprofits to develop the work skills needed for emerging jobs. An increase of $150 million for the Federal WorkStudy Program is also included, which could double the number of participants over five years. Under the President’s budget, funding would be directed toward institutions' demonstrated success in helping students from low-income families complete college. The budget would also expand programs to help students struggling with burdensome student loan debt.

R & D Funding. On the R & D funding side, the President also signaled a commitment to investment, proposing an overall 9 percent increase for non-defense R & D spending. The Department of Energy saw significant increases, as well as the National Science Foundation, U.S. Geological Survey and National Institute of Standards and Technology. For the National Institutes of Health, the President proposed $31 billion in finding for medical research, generally maintaining current spending levels.

As a member of New England Council, we publish the DC Shuttle each week featuring higher ed news from Washington. This edition is drawn from the Council's Weekly Washington Report Higher Education Update, of April 15, 2013.

Founded in 1925, the New England Council is a nonpartisan 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.

On Thursday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee held a hearing on controlling the cost of college. The committee's Ranking Republican, Sen. Michael Enzi (R-WY), said that long-term funding of Pell grants needed to be a priority to move past the costly short-term solutions that have been the norm. Higher education experts told the panel that financial aid must focus on students who have financial need and that financial burden has to be more clearly displayed to students at an early stage. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) suggested the use of a universal financial aid letter and asked about connecting college to post-graduate employment. With collective student debt recently surpassing credit card debt as the largest segment of American debt, the Obama administration has said controlling college costs is a priority.

On Friday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), in conjunction with the Education Department, released a report highlighting "key attributes of the private student loan marketplace." According to the report, students and graduates owe approximately $150 billion in private student loans, while the overall outstanding loan debt is more than $1 trillion. The joint report looks at the growth of the private student loan market over the past 10 years as well as how lenders and marketers sought to change their relationships with students by appealing more directly to them. The report also looks at how many may not have understood how the private loan marketplace works, as a number of students took out more than they needed, or had federal loan options that they did not pursue. Finally, the report makes recommendations by both the CFPB and the Education Department to Capitol Hill "to improve the private student loan marketplace and address consumer protection issues."

On Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) delivered a report to Congress that was critical of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) oversight of student visas. ICE manages the Student and Exchange Visitor Program but the report found that it "has not developed a process to identify and analyze program risks" and cannot provide reasonable assurance that visas are acquired legitimately.

The Department of Education announced Thursday that six more states and the District of Columbia have had waivers approved excusing them from the mandates of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The administration approved the waivers of Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Oregon and South Carolina, bringing the total of states with approved waivers to 32. The states were required to propose standards that they would pursue in place of the NCLB obligations.

As a member of New England Council, we publish the DC Shuttle each week featuring higher ed news from Washington. This edition is drawn from the Council's Weekly Washington Report Higher Education Update, of July 23, 2012.

Founded in 1925, the New England Council is a nonpartisan 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.

Friday, July 1, marked the deadline by which career and for-profit colleges must comply with new Education Department "gainful employment" regulations. Schools offering programs subject to the gainful employment rules published in October 2010 must now report the following information to prospective students:

• average loan debt incurred by program graduates;
• job placement rate for program graduates;
• on-time graduation rate; and
• total tuition and fees, including book costs and room and board, where applicable.

Read the Program Integrity Rule.

On Thursday, the Labor Department announced $17 million in grants for two programs to provide job training to at-risk young adults ages 18 to 24. The grants will focus on juvenile offenders and high school dropouts in high-poverty and high-crime communities. YouthBuild USA based in Somerville, Mass., and the Mid-Atlantic Network of Youth and Family based in Pittsburgh, were awarded the grants through a competitive process. Each program will receive $8.5 million to help the at-risk individuals obtain industry-recognized credentials and prepare them for employment.

Senate Democrats renewed a push to pass the DREAM Act, legislation (S. 952) to grant a path to citizenship to those undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and who attend college or serve in the U.S. military. At a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security, Secretary Duncan urged lawmakers to support the bill in the interests of debt-reduction and job creation. He said that by 2018, the U.S. will have 2.6 million science and math jobs open which DREAM Act students could help fill. Secretary Duncan also cited a Congressional Budget Office report which found that if passed, the legislation would provide a net revenue gain of $1.4 billion over ten years. "Educating the individuals who would be eligible under the DREAM Act would benefit our country," he said. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano added that law enforcement pursuit of the undocumented young people affected by the bill was "siphoning resources from other, more pressing needs." Subcommittee Chair and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) re-introduced DREAM Act legislation in May with 34 cosponsors after it failed to overcome a Senate filibuster during the 111th Congress. Similar legislation passed the House last year, but this year's House companion bill (H.R. 2164) is likely to be blocked by House Judiciary Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX). He is strongly opposed to the measure, which he said would "prevent Americans from getting jobs since millions of illegal immigrants will become eligible to work legally in the United States."

From the New England Council's Weekly Washington Report Higher Education Update, July 5, 2011. NEBHE is a member of the Council and will publish this column each week.

Founded in 1925, the New England Council is a nonpartisan 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.

This set off a barrage of national meetings and attempts to lobby the DOE to retract this ruling. But the DOE, assuming that this rule merely reinforced the status quo, had boxed itself in, and couldn’t now suggest state approval should not be required. For the first time, the federal government would be enforcing state higher education licensure—the equivalent of making jaywalking a federal offense. While the risks might be low, the stakes were high; no institution would ever want to jeopardize title IV funds. Thus, schools have begun to inquire of each state (and territory) what would be necessary to be certified so that local residents might be able to enroll online. Only a very few institutions (and these are mainly large for-profits) ever considered that they might need each state’s approval in advance should someone from that state happened to join their online program.

Likewise, few states had thought much about out-of-state distance-learning programs, and few now have the resources or capacity to take on so many applications.  Many state regulations were devised pre-Internet, and intended to protect their citizens from unscrupulous propriety schools or franchise campuses disconnected from their mother ship. The Internet can bring home campus faculty from leading institutions everywhere through online programs that are truly reflective of the academic standards of their institution.

While a small fraction of the states explicitly mandate that out-of-state distance learning must be licensed, a comparably small number explicitly exempt purely online programs. The majority are ambiguous: Their guidelines either ignore distance learning altogether or suggest that some sort of physical presence triggers state oversight. These triggers might include the presence of local student recruiting or advertising, in-state faculty teaching online that term, proctored exams, student field experiences, or even an institutional office or program completely unrelated to distance learning. Without numerical thresholds, one student or online professor moving to that state might suddenly trigger the need for licensure. A subtle change in a state’s regulations could also trigger the need for an institution to seek licensure.

To attempt to clarify the regulations, the DOE issued two “dear colleague” letters. The first reinforced the need for state approval, while the second postponed the day of reckoning for three years for institutions to pursue state-by-state approval in good faith.

How will the states now respond? The signs thus far seem to suggest that some will shift towards exempting online programs to avoid how taxing this will be on their dwindling resources. Some states might band together to arrange reciprocity or regional approval processes. Other states could see this as a revenue-generating opportunity or a protectionist means of keeping out competing, carpetbagger academic programs.

How will academic institutions respond? Those already invested in distance learning have little choice: They must pay to play. They have no recourse but to commit whatever it takes to stay in distance learning. Depending on a school’s number of online programs, this can cost perhaps a million dollars initially—with some annual expenses continuing in perpetuity—along with countless hours of staff time. Some online programs are so predominately in-state that their schools might need to restrict future enrollment only to local students. The schools hurt most will be those with small numbers of online students distributed nationally across many online programs: Their costs to participate will be high and their revenues low.

The institutional winners will be those with the largest numbers of distance learning enrollments and the deepest pockets to pay whatever it takes to stay in business. The ultimate winner? In many cases, the very for-profits that the Department of Education was targeting in the first place. Why? This ruling effectively shuts the door on new entrants into the otherwise exploding world of e-learning.

The barrier to entry has just been raised if not locked. This ruling potentially solidifies the market share of the big players and unleashes them to grow significantly – at the expense of potential competition. These state-by-state upfront costs just to launch an online program will be stifling if not prohibitive. New, innovative online programs from high-quality institutions are far less likely to emerge. The public will continue to be wary of the integrity of distance education if America’s top institutions opt not to participate. Despite presidential rhetoric for increasing college completion rates, the administration has just made student access to quality higher learning all the more difficult and constrained the overall capacity of the nation’s institutions.

Distance learning most benefits the consumer, especially working students seeking part-time education. Online learning provides choices and educational opportunity never previously apparent to those who cannot relocate for their education. Distance learning brings e-commerce to higher education, with the adult learner as its greatest beneficiary. Distance learning had begun to make New England’s premier institutions available nationally and even globally. But, instead, we are now at risk that educational inequality based solely on where you happen to live will continue to prevail.

Jay A. Halfond is dean of Metropolitan College and Extended Education at Boston University.

Related Posts: Distance Learning 2.0: It Will Take a Village; Distance Learning: Untried and Untrue

Of the $700 million dedicated to the Administration’s Race to the Top grant program this year, $500 million will be used for the Early Learning Challenge, which provides grants for early learning and preschool programs at the state level. A Department of Education press release said that the grants will “reward states that create comprehensive plans to transform early learning systems with better coordination, clearer learning standards, and meaningful workforce development.” The increased focus and the shift from district-based to state-based grants are reactions to reduced funding for Race to the Top in spending bills passed earlier this year. The remaining $200 million in funding will be available for the nine Race to the Top finalist states which did not receive funding in the program’s first round, none of which are in New England.

Congressmen Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-TX) have drafted letters requesting information on privacy policies from the College Board and ACT Inc. Specifically, the letters express concern about the collection and disclosure of personal information from students who take the SAT and ACT tests administered by the organizations. The lawmakers introduced a bill (H.R. 1895) together earlier this month to enhance teen privacy protections online, but it would not apply to nonprofit organizations. Under the bill, the collection of personal and geographic data from 13-year-old to 17-year-old internet users would be curtailed, and could not be used for marketing purposes.

From the New England Council's Weekly Washington Report Higher Education Update, May 31, 2011. NEBHE is a member of the Council and will publish this column each week.

Founded in 1925, the New England Council is a nonpartisan 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.