After months of negotiations, lawmakers have reached agreement on a long-delayed bill that would set federal higher-education policy for at least the next five years.
Negotiators from the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate voted to approve the compromise bill on Tuesday night during a formal conference at the Capitol. The vote was 18 to 3 on the Senate side, and 22 to 1 on the House side.
The bill, which would reauthorize, or renew, the Higher Education Act, the major law governing federal student aid, now heads to the House and Senate floors, where votes are expected by the end of the week.
If it passes, as anticipated, the bill will be the most significant piece of higher-education legislation to clear Congress since September, when lawmakers passed a measure that slashed subsidies to lenders in the government’s student-loan programs and used the savings to significantly increase federal student aid (The Chronicle, September 10).
The reauthorization bill, which is five years overdue, would create dozens of new grant programs for colleges and students, while imposing hundreds of new reporting requirements on institutions. It would crack down on conflicts of interest in the student-loan programs, hold institutions and states accountable for skyrocketing tuition, and make it easier for for-profit colleges to become, or remain, eligible to award federal student aid.
The bill would also prohibit the secretary of education from dictating how colleges measure student learning for purposes of accreditation and overhaul the department’s advisory committee on accreditation issues. However, it omits language in earlier versions of the legislation that would have created a federal ombudsman’s position to resolve accreditation disputes.
Withholding Matching Grants
Before voting to approve the bill at 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, members of the conference panel adopted an amendment by Rep. John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, that would punish states that fail to maintain their higher-education spending. House conferees approved the amendment unanimously by voice vote, and Senate conferees approved it, 12 to 9.
The “maintenance of effort” amendment would withhold College Access Challenge Grant funds from states that failed to raise spending on higher education each year by at least as much as they increased it, on average, over the previous five years. The challenge-grant program offers matching grants intended to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education.
Similar language by Representative Tierney was included in the House’s version of the legislation, but it was stripped from the compromise bill at the insistence of Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee who is also a former governor. As originally written, the provision would have withheld federal Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnership grants, which match each dollar that states commit to need-based aid, rather than College Access Challenge Grant funds.
During debate on the amendment, Mr. Tierney argued that there is a “direct correlation” between state spending and college tuition rates, and described the arguments against his proposal as “somewhat specious.” Groups representing governors and state legislatures have warned that states will be forced to hold down spending during good economic times to avoid being held to more-generous levels when the economy worsens.
Mr. Alexander, in turn, argued that the federal government has no business dictating how states spend their tax revenue, particularly when it is not providing full funds for education for disabled students. To drive home his point, he offered an amendment to Mr. Tierney’s amendment that would prohibit the federal government from punishing states until it lived up to its end of the bargain by providing 40 percent of the average per-student cost for special education.
“I don’t think its our business to be allocating state tax dollars,” he said. “If we want to do that, we should run for governor or for the state legislature.”
The Senate conferees rejected that proposal, 10 to 11.
Mr. Alexander joined two of his Republican colleagues, Sens. Johnny Isakson of Georgia and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, in voting against the bill. Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, cast the lone vote on the House side against the bill.
For the most part, though, the mood inside the negotiating chamber was celebratory. Lawmakers have been working on the measure since 2003, and up until late last week, it seemed doubtful that they would be able to complete work on a compromise bill before Congress’s August recess. If they had failed to do so, the bill could have become entangled in election-year politics and put off for another year.
The bill’s prospects improved last Friday, when lawmakers neared final agreement on a pair of provisions that had tied up negotiations for days. But the measure ran into another stumbling block on Monday, when Senator Coburn, nicknamed “Dr. No” by his colleagues, put a hold on the bill (among many others) in protest over his broad concerns about federal spending. Mr. Coburn agreed to lift his hold on the higher-education bill Tuesday morning, clearing the way for the formal conference last night.
As senators prepared to vote on reporting the compromise bill, known as a conference report, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Democrat of Maryland, offered praise for her colleagues.
“Tonight we will make a difference in the lives of people,” said Ms. Mikulski, who managed the debate in the absence of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Education Committee and who is recovering from brain surgery.
Praise From For-Profit Institutions
Lobbyists for for-profit colleges are equally enthusiastic about the bill, which would make it easier for proprietary institutions to comply with a section of the law known as the “90-10 rule,” which requires those colleges to receive at least 10 percent of their revenue from sources other than federal student aid. The bill would give for-profit institutions new ways to meet the 10-percent threshold while also allowing them to temporarily treat new federal-loan funds as part of their 10 percent.
Congress raised federal-loan limits by $2,000 per year last spring, largely in response to concerns that lenders’ departures from the federal loan programs and tightening credit criteria could make it harder for students to obtain private loans in the coming academic year.
For-profit colleges have also welcomed a provision in the bill that would require colleges to disclose their transfer-of-credit policies. Lobbyists for for-profit institutions have long complained that some traditional colleges refuse to accept credits for courses completed at their colleges simply because their institutions are accredited by national organizations, rather than one of the six regional associations that accredit most traditional, nonprofit institutions.
But lobbyists for traditional institutions have been more measured in their praise of the bill. While they appreciate the new grant programs and accreditation protections, many resent the increased federal oversight that the bill would bring. Under the bill, colleges would be required to disclose everything from their policies on illegal downloading of music and video files to the details of their arrangements with lenders.
More Paperwork
Colleges are also grumbling about the bill’s new reporting requirements, which they maintain would increase their costs at the same time Congress is pressuring colleges to hold the line on tuition growth.
Under the bill, the secretary of education would publish annual lists of the institutions with the highest and lowest tuition and fees, and net prices, by sector, as well as lists of the institutions with the largest percentage increases in net price and in tuition and fees over the previous three years. Institutions appearing on the percentage-based lists would be required to report to the education secretary on the factors that contributed to their price increases and the steps they were taking to hold down costs.
Still, nonprofit colleges can claim some victories. In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s conference, they persuaded lawmakers to drop language that would have required them to notify students and employees within 30 minutes of an emergency and to report any gift over $250,000 that came from a private-sector corporation (though lawmakers left in such a reporting requirement for gifts from foreign governments if the money was to be used for a center receiving funds under the bill).
Colleges also persuaded lawmakers to abandon a requirement that institutions whose net tuition and fees outpaced their sector’s average submit a report to the secretary and provide the secretary with certain tax documents from the previous three years.
And while lawmakers retained a controversial requirement that colleges offer students music and video through subscription-based services, they provided a possible out, adding “to the extent practicable” to the language. Still, the language is considered a coup for the entertainment industry, which contends that illegal downloading on college campuses costs it millions of dollars. The bill also would require colleges to use technology to curtail copyright infringement on their campuses.
The compromise bill also contains some good news for the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, which was created more than two decades ago to counsel Congress and the Education Department on student-aid issues. The House version of the bill would have abolished the influential committee, but the final version preserves it.
