Senate Democrats are poised to introduce a bill to reauthorize the Higher Education Act that would create a unit-record system for tracking individual students, allow borrowers to refinance their student-loan debt, and reverse some recent cuts in the Pell Grant program, according to several sources who have previewed a draft of the measure.
The bill, which lawmakers are expected to introduce next week, would also crack down on for-profit colleges, make the accreditation process more transparent, and create grant programs to encourage innovation and dual enrollment, the sources said.
Like the 2009 stimulus law, the measure would provide incentives for states to sustain their higher-education spending, tying new grants to “maintenance of effort” requirements.
For borrowers, the bill would expand loan counseling, improve student-loan servicing, and automatically enroll in income-based repayment programs any borrowers who were seriously delinquent on their loans. The bill would also create a new metric for judging colleges based on borrowers’ risk of defaulting, and would link federal student aid to colleges’ performance on the measure.
Lawmakers have been gearing up for the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act since September, when the Senate education committee held the first of what would be 10 hearings on higher-education issues.
In a floor speech last week, Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, the committee’s chairman, promised that the reauthorization bill would be “consistent with” the “bipartisan approach” that has characterized the hearings. But Republicans were not consulted during the bill’s drafting, according to a senior GOP aide, and the product is largely a pastiche of Democratic policy priorities.
Partisan or Bipartisan
The proposal on student-loan refinancing, for example, is the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren of Massachusetts. Mr. Harkin, a critic of for-profit colleges, suggested the bill’s ban on the use of federal funds for marketing and recruiting, and stricter limits on how much revenue for-profit colleges can draw from the federal government.
On teacher preparation, sources said, the bill draws from the Educator Preparation Reform Act (S 1062), introduced by Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, as well as the Great Teachers and Principals Act (S 1052), introduced by Sen. Michael F. Bennet of Colorado.
On student aid, the bill would revive year-round Pell Grants and would partially restore aid eligibility for students without a high-school diploma or GED. Those proposals have been pushed by Sen. Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, respectively.
While some of the ideas, such as remaking teacher education, have bipartisan appeal, others are divisive. Republicans have blocked Senator Warren’s refinancing bill from coming to the floor, and they generally disapprove of Democrats’ efforts to reduce aid to for-profit colleges.
Meanwhile, many Republican lawmakers remain opposed to the idea of a unit-record system, nearly six years after Congress blocked the Bush administration from creating one.
Sources said the bill would not repeal the unit-record ban but would instead attempt to work around it, by carving out exceptions. Supporters of such a system say it would provide prospective students and policy makers with more-accurate information about student outcomes, but critics fear that it could compromise student privacy.
Simplifying the Fafsa
It’s unclear if and when Democrats plan to bring the bill to a vote, but it’s unlikely the measure will pass the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Lawmakers there have been holding their own series of hearings on reauthorization, with plans to introduce a bill of their own.
Meanwhile, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the top Republican on the education committee, and Senator Bennet are preparing to release bipartisan legislation to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The bill, which will be announced on Thursday at a noon news conference, would shrink the application from 10 pages to a form the size of a postcard, according to a New York Times op-ed written by the senators.
The new form would ask aid applicants just two questions: “What is your family size? And what was your household income two years ago?”
The measure would also streamline federal loan and loan-repayment programs, and set lower borrowing limits for part-time students.
