House Committee Approves Bills to Rewrite Higher Education Act
Things would probably move faster in this arena if certain lawmakers didn’t continually use the issue to score political points.
Michael Stratford writes at Inside Higher Ed.
House Starts In On HEA
The U.S. House education committee on Thursday advanced a package of legislation that would boost federal support of competency-based education, overhaul how cost information and other data is provided to prospective college students, and require more counseling for federal student loan borrowers.
Lawmakers approved three bills that are part of House Republicans’ piecemeal approach to rewriting the Higher Education Act, which expires at the end of this year but isn’t likely to be reauthorized by then.
The measures all garnered bipartisan support Thursday, but many Democrats on the committee said they were concerned the bills did not go far enough in directly addressing the rising price of college and providing student loan borrowers with needed consumer protections.
Representative George Miller, the top Democrat on the panel, said it was “unconscionable” that lawmakers would not take action on the problem of student debt.
“We must move quickly and decisively to make college more accessible and affordable, to increase oversight and quality assurance of colleges and loan servicers, and to promote new and innovative practices that can reduce student loan debt,” he said. “And this can only happen through a full-scale rewrite of the Higher Education Act.”
Representative John Kline, the Minnesota Republican who chairs the committee, defended his approach to putting forward a series of smaller-scale proposals, which he said was helping to increase bipartisan work on rewriting the law.
House committee approves three bills to rewrite Higher Education Act (Inside Higher Ed | News)
Comments
The fed gov has no business doing anything with education. It is a good which should be subject to market forces. Instead it has become a mechanism to enslave students in massive debt.
We don’t “need more oversight” – we need the gov’t to (mostly) get out of education.
I have said this on many threads – I’ll repeat it here – this is solvable if:
1) We make admissions “financially blind” – meaning the colleges cannot discriminate on the basis of ability to pay.
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2) We offer them then 1 of 2 choices: they can take [X] amount of $$ per student in a voucher (say $ 5-10k) and then make it illegal to take even 1 dime more.
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3) Or the colleges, who claim education is a “right” – can co-sign these loans. They keep telling us it’s an “investment” and it’s worth it – so let them live with the very results they have assured us is needed.