The U.S. Education Department will emphasize student-retention rates and other issues of interest to for-profit colleges as it works with Congress in the next year to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, a top department official said last month at the annual meeting of the Career College Association.
Sally Stroup, the department’s assistant secretary for postsecondary education, said major issues that the Education Department will examine also include accreditation, transfer-of-credit policies, and the student-loan program.
Data indicate that the record of all kinds of colleges on retaining first- and second-year students “is not good,” said Ms. Stroup. The Education Department will examine retention policies “and look at ways to use federal money in an incentive fashion to reward programs that work,” she said. Many officials of the for-profit colleges that make up the Career College Association believe that an emphasis on retention will favor them over large, nonprofit colleges that have poor graduation rates.
The department will also look at the role of accreditation to “make sure it’s doing what we think it should do,” said Ms. Stroup, a former lobbyist for the Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix. Accreditation, she said, “is not about counting books or how many faculty members institutions have.”
She noted, however, that it is not the Education Department’s job to evaluate the quality of individual institutions. “That’s why we have accreditors,” she said.
During a question period, Ms. Stroup said that the department was also looking into a related issue, the transfer-of-credit problem between institutions with different types of accreditation. She said the department is exploring ways to reward institutions that have good transfer-of-credit policies.
Most members of the career-college group are nationally accredited, whereas most four-year institutions, as well as nonprofit two-year colleges, are accredited by regional agencies. For-profit trade and technical colleges have long complained that policies discriminate against students who transfer from institutions that are not regionally accredited. They say their students must often retake general-education courses after transferring to community colleges and four-year institutions, because their credits will not transfer (The Chronicle, June 8, 2001).
Nontraditional Students
Ms. Stroup also signaled the department’s interest in examining how nontraditional students can afford college. “Nontraditional students are no longer the minority,” she said, noting that the federal student-loan programs are not tailored to such students. The career-college sector, by and large, serves such students. The “one size fits all” approach to categorizing students no longer works, she said. “We know it doesn’t work. It’s time to throw it away.”
Also on the department’s priority list, she said, was an examination of the student-loan program and whether the funds are going to those students who are in need. Because of loan limits on federally backed loans, she said, many students must take out private loans. “We are not helping people by forcing them into alternative loan programs,” she said.
Ms. Stroup also hinted that President Bush’s emphasis on quality through the examination of outcomes-based education could extend to the postsecondary level. “I think you’ll see that now we’ll be pushing for outcomes and results,” she said, noting that the Education Department will look specifically at retention and completion rates.
“These are things we need to be able to show to be accountable to the taxpayer,” she said.
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Page: A24
