An Update of the Federal Law Governing Higher Ed Appears Dead. Now There’s a Fight Over Who Killed It.

Getty Images

Could it be that the last chance for this Congress to draft a new Higher Education Act just died because two United States senators can’t resolve a middle-school-style disagreement over who owed whom a call back?

Sure, there’s more to it than that. Democrats and Republicans fundamentally disagree over the federal government’s role in holding colleges accountable and ensuring that a higher education is affordable and accessible to low-income and minority students. Democrats also distrust the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, over her willingness to protect students from unscrupulous colleges. (In the same vein, Republicans believe the Education Department overstepped its authority under the Obama administration.)

But miscommunication between the chairman of the Senate’s education committee and its top minority member is clearly part of the reason renewal of the key law, known as reauthorization, is all but certainly dead until 2019.

Last week Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, announced that he didn’t expect the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which he leads, to produce a reauthorization bill this year. He blamed the panel’s Democrats for inaction, saying they’ve been sitting on a complete proposal from Republicans for four months. “They want to wait until next year to see if they’re in better shape politically” before taking on higher-education reform, Alexander told an audience at a forum sponsored by The New York Times.

On Monday a spokeswoman for Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the committee, painted a different picture.

Alexander had earlier agreed to call Murray by the end of April to discuss plans to draft legislation through a bipartisan process, said the spokeswoman, Mairead Lynn, but “we never heard from him.” His comments last week blaming Democrats for failing to act “were the first time we heard him say that,” she said.

It’s not the Democrats who are refusing to act, Lynn said: “Senator Alexander has walked away from the table.” Murray believes the best way to come to agreement on a bill is for representatives of both parties to write the legislation together, said Lynn, “and not simply exchange partisan drafts and call it a day.”

A top aide to Alexander disputed that assessment on Tuesday, saying Murray’s office was “trying to rewrite history.”

Alexander’s office provided a “a good-faith draft” proposal that included topics that Democrats cared about and a schedule for further meetings, said the aide, who asked not to be named in order to speak candidly. Since then, the aide said, “for four months it’s been crickets.”

Alexander’s office declined to share the proposal it had presented privately to Murray, out of courtesy to her, the aide said. But the aide said the draft reflected the ideas Alexander has published as his five goals for reauthorization.

If Murray changes her mind, Alexander’s aide said, “we’d be there with a notebook and a pen.”

Most functions of higher education that depend on the federal government can continue whether or not the Higher Education Act is reauthorized. Nonetheless, some higher-ed advocates have been looking to the reauthorization process as a chance to modernize policies about accreditation and competency-based education, and even to expand the eligible uses of Pell Grants. The Senate stalemate effectively kills all chances of reauthorization this year.

The Alternative

But for some higher-education leaders, that’s better than one alternative.

That’s because the alternative is a Republican-backed measure passed late last year by the education committee in the U.S. House of Representatives — a measure known as the Prosper Act. It is broadly unpopular with Democrats in Congress, college leaders, and many student-advocate groups because it would eliminate the subsidy on student loans that students now receive while in school, and would eliminate Grad PLUS loans, among other provisions.

“If it’s a choice between no reauthorization and the reauthorization on the table, no authorization is better,” said Daniel T. Madzelan, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education.

Yet Rep. Virginia Foxx, the Republican chair of the House education committee, is continuing to press for a full House vote on the bill. Even if the House approves it, the Prosper Act is not expected to pass the Senate.

With Congress unlikely to act, Secretary DeVos has said the Education Department will use the regulatory process to attain goals that are ordinarily pursued through reauthorization. “While a full rewrite of the law by Congress is the preferred method,” a DeVos spokeswoman told the Times, “the department must move forward with the law that we have. Students don’t have time to wait, and they, along with schools and taxpayers, deserve certainty and relief from the regulatory overreach by the previous administration.”

Among DeVos’s targets for reregulation or deregulation are rules aimed at protecting students from being defrauded by colleges, most of them for-profit institutions; rules that cracked down on colleges, also mostly for-profits, that saddled students with loan debts they could not pay off; rules that fostered state-level authorization of for-profit chains; and perhaps most controversial, the enforcement of Title IX, the part of the law that has been central to a crackdown on sexual harassment and assault on campuses.

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.