Good morning, and welcome to Thursday, December 14. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Higher ed’s new hunger games

The House Commitee on Education and the Workforce advanced a bill on Tuesday that would allow Pell Grants to pay for career-training programs that run for as little as eight weeks. That’s a major step for an idea that’s long been a top priority for the committee’s chairwoman, Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican.

What the bill takes away is as important as what it adds.

The Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act would remove wealthy colleges from key federal student-loan programs. It would do so in order to pay for its other provisions.

Specifically, private colleges that must pay the endowment tax would be largely written out of federal lending. They wouldn’t be allowed to make the following awards:

• Federal Stafford loans to students
• Federal Direct Plus loans to students
• Federal Direct Plus loans to parents of undergraduate students who receive Pell Grants

Criticisms are mounting on several fronts:

• A two-tier educational financing system could form: “We’re going to be to the point where only the super-rich can go to those schools, or middle-income and poor students have to go to private loans and ISAs — loans that don’t have any of the protections of federal loans,” Amy Laitinen, senior director for higher education at the liberal think tank New America, told the Daily Briefing.
• Patronage possibilities may proliferate: “This approach is an unprecedented shift from providing financial aid to students on the basis of their individual need, and toward a system where Congress picks which favored institutions can participate,” the American Council on Education said in talking points.
• Students could see their options limited: “The current language may result in institutional actions that reduce access to higher education for students with financial need at schools already attended by an overwhelmingly high-income student population,” Kelly McManus, vice president for higher education at Arnold Ventures, wrote.

The bill may very well not pass into law. Even if it does, it would probably be revised along the way. Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who cosponsored the bill and is the committee’s ranking member, said lawmakers are constrained in what they can cut to pay for expanding the Pell program. He pledged to seek other ways to cover that.

Nonetheless, the proposal has bipartisan backing. It advanced on a 37-8 committee vote. And even if this particular pay-for provision doesn’t pass now, legislative ideas have a way of resurfacing later on.

To be sure, this shows how far the country’s wealthiest universities have fallen in esteem. Just in the last year or so, several bungled their defense of race-conscious admissions and their handling of reports of antisemitism on campus. They’ve long faced claims they don’t admit enough students from low-income backgrounds and favor the children of donors and alumni.

But the quick traction of this concept is still a blow against the longstanding big-tent approach to federal financial aid. Traditionally, all private nonprofit and public colleges that meet certain quality standards have been able to take part in financial-aid programs.

For-profit institutions have argued they’re singled out in having to meet additional quality standards, but even that argument is based on the idea that all institutions should receive equal treatment in the eyes of the federal financial-aid system.

The bigger picture: Policymakers are increasingly pitting different segments of higher education against one another. Community colleges and for-profit institutions would undoubtedly benefit from the addition of short-term Pell. Under this bill, they’d do so at the direct expense of wealthy institutions. Don’t be surprised if other slices of the sector find themselves at odds in the future.

Quick hits

• Majorities pan higher ed in new poll: Almost eight in 10 respondents to a survey by U.S. News & World Report and The Harris Poll last weekend said colleges are more worried about their endowments than about shaping tomorrow’s leaders. More than six in 10 said colleges put constituents like donors and other external factors ahead of students. (U.S. News)
• Higher-ed inflation cools slightly: Plunging utility costs last year contributed to a slowing increase in the prices that U.S. colleges pay. The Higher Education Price Index fell to 4 percent in the 2023 year, down from 5.2 percent in 2022. That’s more than twice the 1.9-percent rate recorded in 2020, but higher-ed inflation has now tracked below increases in consumer prices for two straight years. (Commonfund)
• Knight Institute raises concerns about college-student surveillance: The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University asked the federal government to explain how it will monitor college-student activities after the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced an effort to work with campus law-enforcement officers to track threats and fight antisemitism. The foundation argued that a “rush to brand legitimate student protest as extremist” echoes arguments used to justify wide-ranging surveillance of Muslims in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that such tracking “will only deepen the atmosphere of alienation and distrust” on college campuses. (Knight Institute, NBC News)
• Donor plunges into academics at Penn: Marc Rowan, chief executive of the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management and a donor who led the successful push to oust the University of Pennsylvania’s president, sent the Ivy League institution’s trustees 18 questions, asking if Penn should consider eliminating academic departments and re-examine its criteria for faculty, instruction, and degrees. The Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors called the letter an assault on academic freedom. (The Philadelphia Inquirer, Academe Blog)
• Carbon-monoxide poisoning suspected in student death: A student at Evergreen State College, in Washington, died in on-campus housing on Monday, and two other students and a police officer were hospitalized with symptoms of carbon-monoxide poisoning. A contractor had responded to carbon-monoxide alarms earlier in the day. (The Seattle Times)

Quote of the day

“All we can do is have differences of opinion.”

—Tamy Abernathy, a policy coordinator at the U.S. Department of Education, responded to criticism that the Biden administration’s latest student-debt forgiveness proposal is too limited.

Little agreement: The Education Department held negotiated rulemaking sessions this week under a bureaucratic process it’s using to craft a new plan for student debt relief. Panelists agreed on canceling loans for students whose colleges closed or failed federal-accountability standards, but advocates for borrowers criticized other limits on forgiveness, USA Today reported. The Biden administration’s latest plan focuses on longtime borrowers who’ve been unable to pay back their loans and those whose loan balances have grown because of interest.

Some panelists requested additional meetings to work through disagreements, but that could further slow a process that’s already not expected to generate a final proposal until May of next year.

Stat of the day

$7.8 billion

That’s how much more 153 selective colleges would collectively need to spend on financial aid each year if they were to use class-based affirmative action to keep their current levels of student diversity after the U.S. Supreme Court banned race-conscious admissions, according to a new Brookings analysis.

The total financial-aid bill would be even bigger. That group of selective colleges currently spends about $10 billion on financial aid annually but leaves students to cover another $10.1 billion in unmet need. That means the institutions would need to spend about $30 billion in all to meet students’ full financial need and keep racial diversity high.

How the modeling works: Researchers simulated several admissions strategies to diversify enrollments and found only one that would offset the loss of race-conscious admissions: adding 200 points to Pell Grant recipients’ standardized-test scores. Doing so would allow selective colleges to keep Black and Latino/a enrollments close to their current aggregate levels of 5 percent and 15 percent, respectively. It would also mean admitting more low-income students who need financial aid.

Quotable: “Ultimately, class-based affirmative action is considerably less efficient at achieving racial diversity than race-based affirmative action, and it cannot succeed without a considerable infusion of funding to help cover the greater need for financial aid,” the researchers wrote.

Comings and goings

• Latha Ramchand, executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of Missouri at Columbia, has been named executive vice president and chancellor of Indiana University at Indianapolis.
• Stephen R. St. Onge, executive director of auxiliary operations at California State Polytechnic University at Humboldt, has been named vice president for enrollment management and student affairs at Kutztown University.
• Willette Burnham-Williams, enterprise chief equity officer at the Medical University of South Carolina, has been named vice president for equity and inclusion at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut.
• Jonathan Epstein, executive vice dean and chief scientific officer in the Perelman School of Medicine and senior vice president of the University of Pennsylvania’s health system, has been named interim executive vice president for the health system and dean of the medical school following J. Larry Jameson’s appointment as interim president.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.

Footnote

It is amazing what two hours of sleep can do for the body and mind. It is amazing what an hour of sleep can do. It is amazing what 15 minutes of sleep can do.

This isn’t groundbreaking insight. All parents know it. I thought I knew. But sleep took on new meaning after my daughter was born a few weeks ago.

My wife and I are fortunate to have a child who has, so far, spared us the worst sleep trials and tribulations. Yes, she wakes up regularly to eat or demand a diaper change, but she’s shown no signs of colic. And we are lucky to have several friends and family members who reinforced the important advice to “sleep when the baby sleeps.”

Still, I’m struck by the wonders a quick nap can do for productivity and focus. Perhaps this Daily Briefing was brought to you by a power nap. I’ll never confirm it. I won’t deny it, either.

🍼 Parents, what happened in your work life after a new baby arrived? Did your dean surprise you by offering schedule flexibility? Did you show up at the wrong lecture hall because you were up all night and thought it was Wednesday when it was, in fact, Tuesday?

Send your stories, lessons learned, and photos to dailybriefing@chronicle.com. We want to run some of your best submissions in future Footnotes.