In honor of Veterans Day, the White House is announcing new measures to shield veterans from shoddy colleges and vocational schools.
On Wednesday the administration will release an updated GI Bill Comparison Tool that will allow veterans to compare colleges based on veteran-specific graduation and retention rates. In addition, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Federal Trade Commission will sign an agreement to strengthen oversight and enforcement to protect against programs that engage in deceptive or misleading advertising, sales, or enrollment practices aimed at veterans.
The White House is also announcing that public colleges in all 50 states now allow recent veterans and their dependents to attend at lower, in-state tuition rates, regardless of their state of residency. That milestone, required under a federal law, was supposed to have been reached by July 1, but the Obama administration extended the deadline to January 1, to give colleges more time to comply.
Meanwhile, the president is calling on Congress to pass a trio of bills that would:
- Require colleges that receive money through the GI Bill to meet state-specific criteria for accreditation, certification, and licensure (HR 2360).
- Give the administration the authority to reinstate GI benefits for students whose colleges close in the middle of a term (S 2253).
- Replace the 90/10 rule with an 85/15 rule.
Under that final change, for-profit colleges would have to receive at least 15 percent of their revenue from nonfederal sources to qualify for federal student aid, and military-based tuition benefits could no longer be counted as nonfederal money.
In a call with reporters on Tuesday, Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said such a shift would “ramp up accountability to schools that are marketing to veterans” and ensure that they were providing an education that students would be willing to pay for with their own money.
Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.
Correction (11/11/2015, 7:44 a.m.): This article originally misstated a provision of one of the bills being backed by President Obama. It would require for-profit colleges to receive at least 15 percent, not 85 percent, of their revenue from nonfederal sources in order to qualify for federal student aid. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
