A bill that would bar the U.S. Department of Education from developing a new “gainful employment” rule and other higher-education regulations, and that would eliminate a host of existing consumer-protection regulations, is slated for a vote on Wednesday before a key committee of the House of Representatives.
The measure is unlikely to pass in the Democrat-controlled Senate but is notable for the boldness with which it seeks to limit the agency’s authority—so much so that one higher-education leader privately called it an “affront” to the department.
The bill is backed by several major associations representing colleges and accreditors, including the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. The groups are unhappy with federal rules they call “complex, confusing, and burdensome.”
Yet three major associations representing public colleges—the American Association of Community Colleges, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities—have declined to join in endorsing the bill. And a coalition of student, consumer, veteran, and civil-rights organizations strongly oppose the bill, arguing that it would force the department to “turn a blind eye” to practices that have led to the abuse of billions of dollars in federal student-aid funds.
At issue is the Supporting Academic Freedom Through Regulatory Relief Act (HR 2637), a bill introduced this month by Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina and Rep. John P. Kline Jr. of Minnesota, both Republicans, and Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, a Florida Democrat. Mr. Kline is chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and Ms. Foxx is chair of its subcommittee on higher education.
Ms. Foxx said in a statement that the regulations were “stifling pioneering institutions at a time when forward-thinking solutions are desperately needed.”
‘Going Through the Wringer’
The bill takes aim at three controversial rules: the gainful-employment regulation, the state-authorization rule, and the regulations that define credit hours in connection with the awarding of federal student aid. In 2012 the House approved a bill to block the credit-hour and state-authorization rules, and in 2011 the House voted to constrain the department from developing a gainful-employment rule. Neither of those bills passed the Senate.
The new bill would go even further than those prior ones by barring the department from issuing any new regulations related to these matters until after Congress next reauthorizes the Higher Education Act.
The rules the bill focuses on do need fixing, but the proposed legislation is “quite extreme,” said Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis for the state-colleges association, adding that it seems untenable to “await a reauthorization that may be years in the making to stop fraud.”
He noted that the department and negotiators will soon be developing a new gainful-employment rule to replace the one tossed out by a federal judge, and that problems with the other regulations could be resolved “with far greater nuance” without resorting to an outright ban on regulation.
The bill, he said, appears to “throw a bone to the for-profits.” They oppose the gainful-employment rule, which could cut off federal student aid to programs whose graduates have high debt-to-income burdens and low loan-repayment rates. The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the chief for-profit-college trade group, favors the bill.
Becky H. Timmons, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, which organized a separate letter of support for the bill, said the idea of working out problems in the rules without a ban sounded good “in a perfect world,” But, she added, that would succeed only “if the department was more adept at producing regulations that focused with a laserlike way” on the problems.
Already, she said, too many of the council’s member institutions, particularly community colleges, were “going through the wringer” to comply with the recordkeeping and disclosure requirements of the gainful-employment regulation, even though the guts of it have been thrown out.