House Republicans Challenge New England Senators on Shaping Aid Policy

You don’t have to look too hard to see the imprint of lawmakers from New England on federal student-aid policy.

Pell Grants, the primary source of federal aid for students from low-income families, are named for Claiborne Pell, the former Democratic senator from Rhode Island, who helped create them. Stafford Loans, the largest source of federal student loans, honor Robert T. Stafford, the former Republican senator from Vermont, who played a significant role in shaping the guaranteed-loan program.

Over the past 35 years, Democratic and Republican senators from the six New England states have generally put aside partisan differences when working on financial-aid policy, striving together to create and expand student-aid programs during good economic times, and to fend off cuts during bad times.

Today, even as New England’s dominance in the higher-education market is slipping, the region’s domination of higher-education policy in the U.S. Senate is undiminished. New England senators hold 6 seats -- one for each state -- on the 21-member Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, the panel in charge of higher-education policy. Among those lawmakers are the panel’s Democratic chairman, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, and its ranking Republican, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire.

Increasingly, however, the higher-education policies that New England senators have long promoted are being challenged. The 1995 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and the retirement last year of some key lawmakers have brought to power new leaders -- most of them Republicans and many of them from the West and South -- who do not share many of the basic values and assumptions about higher education that are sacrosanct to the New England senators.

For example, they don’t understand why college has to cost so much and why federal policy should support the most expensive forms of higher education. They wonder why students are expected to leave their home states to obtain a quality education. Often from states where colleges are few and far between, they champion distance learning and want to make it easier for students in such programs to receive federal help. And they tend to support career colleges because their states are home to more for-profit colleges and are less tied to traditional colleges than New England is.

They also question why institutions in New England continue to receive a disproportionate share of funds from some of the government’s student-aid programs when demographic changes have left states outside of New England responsible for educating many more needy students.

“There is a feeling that our states, historically, have not been as well represented in D.C.,” says Diane Vines, a vice chancellor of the Oregon University System and a commissioner on the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, an organization that provides data and policy analysis for governors and legislators in 15 Western states. “And, as a result, the needs of our states have seldom been taken into account.”

Ever since the Democrats took over the Senate, in June, the House and Senate have clashed frequently. But when it comes to making higher-education policy, regional differences in the makeup of the chambers’ education committees can be just as divisive as partisan politics.

Unlike the Senate’s education panel, the 49-member House Committee on Education and the Workforce has only one representative from New England -- Rep. John F. Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat. While the committee is led by Rep. John A. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, a majority of the panel’s Republicans come from the South and West. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. George Miller, and its leader on higher-education issues, Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, are both from California.

The regional tilts of the two committees may be critical to their deliberations when they start working on the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the law that governs the $50-billion federal student-aid programs. The act expires next year.

Student-aid experts predict that the New England senators will find it more difficult than in the past to protect the interests of traditional higher-education institutions from attacks by House lawmakers and the Bush administration, which frequently sides with them.

The battle has already been joined over a bill that would pare back powers that Congress previously had given the Education Department to weed out unscrupulous institutions from the student-aid programs.

The bill (HR 1992), sponsored by Rep. Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican, would make it easier for distance-education students to receive federal financial aid by relaxing two rules. One denies such aid to students who aren’t in class at least 12 hours a week, and the other excludes institutions from the federal aid programs if they offer more than half of their courses at a distance or if more than half of their students take distance-education courses.

The legislation would also alter a provision in the Higher Education Act that prohibits colleges from providing bonuses or other incentive payments to administrators based on their success in enrolling students. For-profit colleges say that the Education Department has interpreted the provision too broadly, making it almost impossible for them to reward their employees for performance. Officials at traditional colleges support some tinkering with the regulations, but they warn that any changes must preserve the spirit of the law, so that institutions cannot disregard students’ interests in their zeal to increase enrollment.

The House approved the bill in October by a vote of 354 to 70, with two-thirds of the Democrats joining almost all the Republicans in support. Even so, the bill has not seen the light of day in the Senate.

Holding up the bill is Senator Kennedy, chairman of the education committee. It was Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Pell, as well as other key lawmakers from New England, who drafted those restrictions in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

At that time, the news media were flooded with reports that for-profit institutions were sending recruiters to welfare offices, where they would round up students who qualified for financial aid but weren’t ready for college work.

Proponents of for-profit colleges -- including their supporters in the House -- say those days are long gone. They argue that the restrictions are making it harder for low-income students to take advantage of new educational opportunities.

An aide to Mr. Kennedy says that the senator has agreed to hold a hearing on the bill this spring. “Senator Kennedy looks forward to a full and open discussion of these issues,” the aide says.

Although they are pleased by the news, lobbyists for career colleges say that they are still not optimistic about the bill’s chances in the Senate.

New England lawmakers, like many higher-education leaders in that region, remain skeptical of the for-profit sector. Career colleges have never flourished in the region, as they have elsewhere in the country, in part because the New England states have more-stringent requirements for approving new colleges.

“Schools that deliver education in nontraditional ways have gone to states to operate where the rigor for who gets to play and who doesn’t is looser,” says Joseph L. McCormick, a former Washington lobbyist for the University of Phoenix, a fast-growing chain of for-profit institutions. “The University of Phoenix couldn’t have gotten started in states like Massachusetts, because the regulators there are far more traditional in their approach. The Western states are far more open to novel approaches.”

Some former Congressional aides say the New England senators’ skepticism about the for-profit industry has a lot to do with the region they represent. “It has not been an easy row to hoe on behalf of proprietary schools in the Senate,” says David V. Evans, who was a top Democratic aide to the education committee under Senator Pell for 15 years. “And I think that does come from their support for traditional postsecondary education, which has such deep roots in New England.”

Bruce Leftwich, vice president for government relations at the Career College Association, agrees that his group and its members still have a lot of work to do to persuade college leaders and lawmakers from New England “that our students are making significant contributions to society and the economic well-being of the country.”

But it’s not only for-profit colleges that want Congress to make it easier for distance-education students to obtain federal financial aid. Officials at four-year institutions in the South and West say they wish the New England senators would consider how their policies affect people in all regions of the country.

Ms. Vines of the Oregon University System says distance-education programs that meet strict standards of quality may offer the only hope of a college education for thousands of low-income students in the Western states, who do not want to move away to go to college. “If we believe that access is important, which we do, then any way that we can make access more available, without making students leave their communities, is worthwhile,” she says.

Another big fight is expected over the formula that the government uses to distribute funds in several of its major financial-aid programs.

The government’s three campus-based aid programs no longer serve the country’s neediest students well, some student-aid experts say. A select group of institutions, many of them wealthy and in New England, has benefited the most from those programs. That is because the programs’ funds are divided largely on the basis of a formula set 20 years ago, even though college demographics have changed sharply since then. Now many more low-income students attend low-cost, public two-year and four-year institutions, especially in the South and West.

The campus-based programs -- the College Work-Study, the Perkins Loan, and the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant Programs -- are intended to supplement Pell Grants for needy students, and to provide aid for others who just miss the cutoff for the grants. Unlike Pell Grants, which are awarded directly to students, campus-based aid is distributed to colleges, which add their own money to the programs and give the funds to the students.

One reason New England colleges get a disproportionate share of funds from those programs is that the formula used to allocate the aid takes into account the tuition that institutions charge. As a result, high-cost colleges common in New England get more money.

Even more significant, aid experts say, the formula essentially guarantees colleges the same share of federal aid that they have received since the 1970s, helping older, more traditional institutions and leaving little money avail able for colleges that have entered the programs since then, or for those that now enroll greater proportions of needy students.

Without support from the programs, low-income students would have to go deeply into debt to attend high-priced, private colleges, and probably would choose not to enroll, say advocates for those colleges. Needy students should not be precluded from attending private colleges, where their likelihood of succeeding is far greater than it is at two- or four-year public institutions, they say.

Mr. Kennedy and other New England senators have defeated past efforts to change the formula. In 1998, for example, the Clinton administration recommended that lawmakers redistribute the funds, reducing colleges’ base guarantees by 5 percent a year. The New England senators objected to that proposal.

They agreed, however, to allow colleges to maintain their base guarantees, but permit all institutions to compete for new money coming into the programs based on their students’ level of need. Before that change, colleges already in the programs received, in addition to their base guarantees, one-quarter of all new funds that lawmakers appropriated. The change took effect in 1999.

But increases in the programs’ budgets have not been large enough to benefit many new institutions. Out of frustration, California’s Congressional delegation, led by Mr. McKeon and Mr. Miller, last year helped persuade Con gress to provide additional funds to two California State University campuses that get very small allotments from the campus-based programs. As part of a larger spending bill, lawmakers agreed to set aside up to $1-million for the Monterey Bay and San Marcos campuses from work-study funds that colleges return to the government that have gone unused.

Many student-aid experts believe that the California lawmakers are gearing up for a much broader fight over the formula for campus-based aid during the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

But Mr. Evans, the former Senate aide, predicts reform will be elusive.

“You’re not going to find senators from New England saying, Oh well, let’s just throw that formula out and start anew,” says Mr. Evans. “Clearly, the formula is tremendous for colleges from New England, and they’re not going to agree to changes that would harm their institutions.”

Senator Kennedy, who turns 70 this month, has been in Congress for almost 40 years. Some college lobbyists and officials wonder whether New England will be able to maintain its dominance over the Senate education committee when Mr. Kennedy and other senior senators from the region retire.

Mr. Evans, for one, does not expect to see the region’s influence over higher-education policy in the Senate wane. He cites the generations of senators from the New England states who have succeeded one another on the education panel. For example, Vermont has had a seat on the panel for the last four decades, from Winston L. Prouty in the 1960s, to Mr. Stafford in the 1970s and 1980s, to the current senator, James M. Jeffords, who has been on the committee since 1989.

Senators from Southern or Western states may start taking a greater interest in higher education in years to come, but for their constituents, seats on the defense, energy, or agriculture committees will always be more important.

“As long as higher education remains so critical to New England’s economy and to the lives of its citizens, senators from those states will flock to that committee,” Mr. Evans said.

REGIONAL CLOUT ON A KEY COMMITTEE Every one of the six New England states has a senator on the influential Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, accounting for nearly a third of its 21 members. Both the chairman and the ranking member are also from New England. Chairman Edward M. Kennedy Democrat -- Massachusetts Ranking Member Judd Gregg Republican -- New Hampshire New England members: Susan M. Collins Republican -- Maine Christopher J. DoddDemocrat -- Connecticut James M. Jeffords Independent -- Vermont Jack ReedDemocrat -- Rhode Island Other members: Democrats Republicans Jeff Bingaman New Mexico Christopher S. Bond Missouri Hillary R. Clinton New York Michael B. Enzi Wyoming John Edwards North Carolina Bill Frist Tennessee Tom Harkin Iowa Mike DeWine Ohio Barbara A. Mikulski Maryland Pat Roberts Kansas Patty Murray Washington Tim Hutchinson Arkansas Paul D. Wellstone Minnesota Jeff Sessions Alabama John W. Warner Virginia

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