A Divided Congress Is Unlikely to Compromise on Higher Ed. But What if It Did?

In the wake of Tuesday’s election results, there will inevitably be talk of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, the main federal law governing student aid and other key higher-education policies, during the next two years.

Democrats, who come January will hold a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, could put forward a bill based on the Aim Higher Act, a blueprint for higher education that they drafted earlier this year.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, can serve just two more years as head of that committee and would like to cement his legacy by pushing through a reauthorization bill, a piece of legislation that he has been considering since at least 2015 and that is already five years overdue.

Then the chambers could reconcile their bills through a conference committee and shoot it on over to President Trump for his signature. Right?

No, probably not. The political hurdles are numerous and substantial, and the odds of either of those scenarios happening is somewhere between “not good” and “zero.” While lawmakers in both parties agree on a number of things they would like to change in the current Higher Education Act — such as how to ensure accountability through accreditation, how to lower student-loan defaults, and how to give colleges incentives to control the price of tuition — they are far apart on proposed solutions.

So what are some areas legislators could work on if they really wanted to rewrite the Higher Education Act? Here is a short primer on three issues where lawmakers might be able to bridge the partisan divide:

Fafsa Simplification. Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the Free Application for Federal Student Aid is too long and presents a hurdle, in particular for low-income students, to receiving aid for college. Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, has become well known for proposing that the Fafsa, as it is called, should be no longer than a postcard, with just 15 to 25 questions. A stand-alone bill, introduced by Alexander and Sen. Michael F. Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, would have cut the form to just two questions.

The Democrats’ Aim Higher Act also calls for streamlining the process of applying for aid, creating the easiest path for students from low-income families who would be eligible for Pell Grants.

In fact, both progressive and conservative experts on higher-education policy have called for eliminating the form altogether. “If a family has very low income, say $15,000, then the student is eligible for the maximum Pell Grant. We don’t need to ask whether the family receives food stamps,” wrote the economist Susan M. Dynarski in an essay for the Brookings Institution in 2015. Dynarski is a professor of public policy, education, and economics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Providing Better Data. Whether you’re a hard-core free-marketer or committed to heavy government oversight and consumer protection, you’d probably make a priority of providing better data on college outcomes for students.

The gold standard for that approach, in many circles, is a unit-record system, which would track the academic and financial records of individual students from when they enroll in college well into their working years.

The Spellings Commission — convened by Margaret Spellings, an education secretary under President George W. Bush — recommended such a system, and legislation to create it has been floating around Congress since 2012. Bipartisan bills, called the College Transparency Act, were introduced in both the House and the Senate as recently as last year.

But private colleges, represented by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, have long opposed a student unit-record system, as have advocates of stronger data privacy. A ban on connecting federal databases to create such a system was placed in the current Higher Education Act by Rep. Virginia A. Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, who now leads the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. That will change in January, when Rep. Bobby C. Scott, a Virginia Democrat, is likely to succeed her.

Some state systems have created their own data tools to show the employment outcomes for students in specific majors. Earlier this year, for example, the University of Texas system unveiled a website that shows students what they can expect to earn with degrees in specific fields one, five, or 10 years after graduation, no matter where they live and work. They can also see how long it takes, on average, to earn a specific degree and what their student debt might be.

But such state-based systems have their deficiencies. Some can track only those students who remain in the state to work after graduation. Others are limited by the reliability of their data on earnings or the size of their database. Policy experts have long urged a national system as the best solution.

Federal Student Aid for Short-Term Training. The job market is constantly changing, and with those changes has come the need to provide short-term educational programs for workers who want to upgrade their skills without spending two or four years in college.

One way to do that would be to allow low-income students to use Pell Grants in certificate programs that take less than 16 credit hours. That approach could give students a way into a middle-class job without the enormous opportunity cost of a longer-term degree program.

Such a change has been proposed by the American Association of Community Colleges, which would limit the aid to 2 percent of overall spending on Pell Grants and would give priority to “older students who are interested in ‘skilling up.’”

The proposal also has bipartisan backing. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, and Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican of Ohio, introduced a bill in January 2017 to allow Pell Grants to be used for short-term certificates.

While progressive groups generally support the expansion of Pell Grants, the senators’ approach has raised concerns about ensuring that the money goes to quality programs.

A 2017 bill introduced by a group of Democrats included a proposal to offer Pell Grants for short-term programs, for example. But New America, a research organization, said there were too few safeguards to keep bad actors from taking advantage of students.

“The risk remains that shady institutions will be unable to resist the temptation of offering short-term credentials of little value on their own, and that the guardrails will prove insufficient to identify and remove bad actors once they’re in the system,” Clare McCann, New America’s deputy director for federal higher-education policy, wrote in a blog post about the bill.

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.