What Would the Repeal of Higher Ed’s Foundational Law Mean for Colleges?

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Remarks by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week focused attention on an idea that would fundamentally change higher ed: repealing its foundational piece of legislation — the Higher Education Act of 1965 — and replacing it with a new law.

Ms. DeVos first suggested in May that the law should be scrapped. And earlier this week, she told the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, “Adding to a half-century patchwork will not lead to meaningful reform. Real change is needed.”

The law has been reauthorized eight times, and it is currently past due for another update — with several top senators pushing to revamp it. Lamar Alexander, a former college president and education secretary who also chairs the Senate’s education committee, is one of those senators. But the Tennessee Republican has also called for outright repeal in the past. “Let’s write a new law — repeal the old law and have new regulations written with our oversight,” he said during a 2013 hearing to discuss reauthorizing the law. Senator Alexander suggested a new law “not as an ideological exercise but simply in a way that someone would weed a garden before planting a new crop.”

He made similar remarks two years later, dropping the explicit support for repeal, but maintaining the idea that cumbersome regulations should be removed instead of written over. “The Higher Education Act we see today — a nearly 1,000-page law with an equal amount of pages devoted to higher education regulations — is simply the piling up of well-intentioned laws and regulations,” he said.

What would repeal look like in practice?

Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University, said the idea of starting over with the law is appealing, given that parts of it are out of date. “But trying to replace it with a coherent set of rules for colleges and universities,” he said, “is probably too much for one Congress in the current administration to do.”

And for a Congress plagued by gridlock and low public approval, those concerns may apply doubly. But that doesn’t mean a future Congress won’t take up repeal of the act. What would a brand new Higher Education Act need to include for colleges and the students they serve?

A Fresh Start

The Higher Education Act is flush with regulations that are fundamental to institutions’ daily operations, including how federal institutional aid is distributed and the origin of the Pell Grant. If the legislation were repealed, several basic questions would need to be answered, said Colleen Campbell, associate director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

“One thing people don’t often take into account is the challenge of implementation,” she said. By switching the system completely, students with funding such as the Pell Grant, that are guaranteed under the law, would still need those resources in the interim. “How do we go from one system to another if we were to blow everything up and go afresh?”

Beyond the logistics of the switch, Ms. Campbell said, it would be important for a brand new law to include money for institutions and students who have received past support or are underserved by postsecondary education. “If we’re talking about getting rid of HEA and getting something completely new, I can’t imagine a scenario where minority-serving institutions and historically black colleges wouldn’t exist,” she continued. Black colleges, which the Trump administration has placed a spotlight on, receive a large share of funding from Title III of the act, which “authorizes funding for enhancing” historically black colleges and universities. Similar pieces of the former legislation would also have to be copied and pasted into the new version.

If a new bill were to materialize, several policy wonks suggested that a strong financial-aid base would be key. “The Pell Grant is the foundation of our financial-aid system. And that type of need-based aid should remain the foundation of any system moving forward,” said Mamie Voight, vice president for policy research at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Ms. Voight also suggested tying the Pell Grant to inflation to increase its buying power.

A new law could present lawmakers with the opportunity to fix several lingering issues such as student debt, accreditation, shortfalls in institutional funding, and the data that students and families use to make decisions about attending college.

Mr. Kelchen, of Seton Hall, suggested that student-loan repayment should be simplified — perhaps by moving to a single repayment plan from the five that borrowers currently choose from. President Trump proposed a similar streamlining of repayment plans on the campaign trail and in the administration’s recent budget request.

Mr. Alexander told The Chronicle in a statement that the proposed legislation for revamping the Higher Education Act contains proposals to “simplify the dreaded Fafsa and the maze of loan and repayment plans so it’s easier for students to go to college and to repay their loans.” That legislation could be a part of a new law as well.

A new law could find ways to make sure that institutions are held accountable for helping their students and preparing them for the job market. Mr. Kelchen added that “there may be a debate about whether accountability should be at the institution level or the program level.” But to solve that debate, better data are needed.

A bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers recently introduced legislation that could improve the quality of those data. The College Transparency Act of 2017, introduced in May, would repeal the federal ban on a student “unit record” system. The system would make aggregate information about the employment outcomes of students available down to the program level. Advocates for the system, include a majority of the major college groups, say it would help students and their families make more informed decisions about colleges. However, there has been some opposition. And several observers say that it could be moved only in a reauthorization — or rethinking — of the Higher Education Act.

“We could address some of the systemic issues in postsecondary education through a complete reimagining of the Higher Education Act,” said Ms. Campbell. But broader support for a full overhaul, especially among institution groups, could be a challenge.

Mr. Kelchen doesn’t rule out the feasibility of a complete reimagining of the Higher Education Act, but he says the scope would make it a heavy lift. “These are all ideas that have been done. To put them all into one reauthorization would be difficult. But to completely rethink all the other rules and regulations in HEA on top of that would be very difficult.”

Adam Harris is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @AdamHSays or email him at adam.harris@chronicle.com.