College Costs

No Loan Crisis Here, Report New England Colleges

Sen. Grassley Requests New IRS 990 Form for Colleges

Survey Reveals How Families Pay for College

Barack Obama wants to give families a refundable $4,000 tax credit for college if their children complete a required amount of community service. It's a fine, conventional Democratic idea. It could be a lot more powerful, though, if Obama coupled it with an old Republican favorite -- depositing his $4,000 credit into private accounts like the so-called 529 plans that so many upper-income families use to save for college.

There are already 12 higher education-related tax credits and deductions on the books, including the Clinton administration's HOPE and Lifetime Learning tax credits. To varying degrees they make college more affordable for those with taxable income who get over the hump of initially enrolling in school.

But the current education tax benefits are a mess of different eligibility standards, confusing forms, delayed delivery, and regressive rewards. One in four eligible families claims the wrong amount, according to the Government Accountability Office. And financial aid specialists agree none of them do a good job at promoting college access for those who otherwise wouldn't go.

By Ben Miller, Stephen Burd, and Sara Mead

Yesterday, Higher Ed Watch highlighted our favorite provisions in the final version of legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. With Congress poised to approve the bill today and send it to President Bush for his signature, we take a critical look at the parts of the legislation that fail to close loopholes, open new areas for potential exploitation, and weaken existing accountability frameworks.

• Easing Restrictions on Trade Schools
  

For-profit colleges' lobbyists are exuberant about the reauthorization legislation. And who can blame them? Congress has gutted a key consumer protection provision that the career college lobbyists have been trying to kill since it was first introduced in 1992. The provision, which is known as the "90-10 rule," was intended to crack down on unscrupulous trade schools. It requires proprietary institutions to receive at least 10 percent of their revenue from sources other than federal student aid in order to participate in the aid programs. Congress' legislation would keep the requirement in place, but takes all the teeth out of it.

By Ben Miller, Stephen Burd, and Sara Mead

A decade after its last reauthorization and five years since an updated version was due, a new version of the Higher Education Act is finally ready for Congressional passage. With both chambers set to vote on the bill this week, Higher Ed Watch will take a closer look at various parts of the legislation over the next two days. Today, we praise lawmakers for doing the following:

• Putting Teeth Into Loan Auctions

Last year, Congress created a groundbreaking pilot auction program that uses market forces to set student loan subsidy rates for lenders making federal PLUS loans to parents. With about a year left to enact the pilot project, lawmakers have added penalties for lenders who win an auction and then back out. The bill allows the Education Secretary to punish lenders that violate the terms of the auction agreement by one of the following methods: fining the lender for any additional costs needed to find and subsidize a replacement PLUS loan lender; banning the offending lender from future auctions; or, kicking them out of the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program entirely. We particularly like the fact that the Secretary can retrieve the fine by reducing subsidies paid to the lenders on other FFEL loans or having another federal agency garnish other subsidies the lender might receive. While we have some complaints about the language (it doesn't, for example, address the PLUS loan auction bidding cap, which needs to be more flexible to encourage robust bidding in a range of financial market conditions), overall, we believe that this provision is an important step forward in getting this pilot program off the ground.

Is the U.S. Department of Education deliberately trying to undermine a new program created by Congress to encourage students to pursue careers in the public service?

That question came to mind as we reviewed the Education Department's proposed regulations for enacting the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that Congress created in September as part of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act (CCRA).

Under the program, the federal government will forgive the remaining debt of Direct Student Loan borrowers if they make 120 payments on their loans while holding a low-paying, full-time public service-oriented job. Borrowers with loans through the competing Federal Family Education Loan program can take advantage of this benefit by consolidating their debt into Direct Lending.

The program is a reaction to reports that student loan borrowers are increasingly shying away from pursuing public-service careers, such as teaching and social work, and is designed to provide incentives to get college graduates to enter these fields and reward them for their service.

By Robert Mackey

In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act,” what would be commonly called the “GI Bill.” It was a model of success, educating future presidents, Nobel Prize winners, writers, poets, musicians, and teachers, as well as a generation of mechanics, farmers, and technicians. By the time it expired in 1956, it had changed the face of American higher education and boosted a generation into the middle class.

On June 30, President Bush signed into law the newest version of the GI Bill, legislation that promised to reward the service of the men and women who have worn the uniform since September 11, 2001. This measure, which would significantly expand higher education benefits for veterans, has won bipartisan acclaim, with only a slight ripple from those concerned that the recipients of said governmental largesse will flee from the military in droves, cash in hand, ready to actually go to college.

These critics need not worry because, despite the hype, this bill is not really a new version of the World War II bill at all, but in many ways a repackaged enlistment benefit meant to tie the individual servicemember to the military for decades before full privileges are earned.

The original GI Bill was simply a reward for service. It was intended to ensure that troops coming back from World War II were able to get an education, move into the middle class, and contribute to the system, in stark contrast to how veterans had been treated since the American Revolution (a small "separation" pay if you were lucky, your likely ragged uniform and out the door). Most importantly, the original bill was not tied to future service—you didn’t enlist to gain the benefits; your past service was the only deciding factor. And the actual amount of money involved could be substantial: full tuition, books, room and board were covered until 1952, when an amendment to the act changed it to a simple stipend ($110 a month, the equivalent of about $900 in 2007).

By Art Hauptman

Current arrangements for providing financial support to college students and their families in this country are not meeting many of the objectives for which they were intended. The Spellings Commission summed it up well in its final report: "The entire financial aid system - including federal, state, institutional, and private programs - is confusing, complex, inefficient, duplicative, and frequently does not direct aid to students who truly need it." As a result, the Commission and a number of other groups with wide ranging political agendas have recommended that "the entire student financial system be restructured". But what would that entail?

Since first established in the 1960s, the federal student aid programs of grants, loans, and work-study - in concert with state, institutional, and private efforts - have provided access to a postsecondary education for millions of Americans who otherwise might not have had enough funds to attend. More recently, federal tax offsets against current tuition expenses and tax-preferred incentives for college savings serve as an important source of financial relief for hard-pressed taxpayers from a range of incomes who worry that they will be unable to pay the constantly mounting bill for tuition and other expenses.

House Passes Bill to Ease Credit Crunch Impact on Student Loans, Others in the Works

No Crisis Here, Says American Council on Education

Dems Introduce Legislation to Allow Private College TA Unions

Falling state support for higher education has a number of onerous effects: increased tuition and fees, more student debt, and a greater likelihood of scaring away low-income students. Less examined is that lost state revenue has driven many public universities and state colleges to find new and previously untapped funding sources - even ones that have dangerous repercussions for their students.

Despite nearly a half decade of solid economic growth, aggregate state support of higher education funding has fallen by 7.8 percent over the past five years in real terms. But the average obscures the wide variability among states. For example, in states such as Alabama, Hawaii, and Wyoming, appropriations per full-time student increased by at least 20 percent. The flipside, of course, is that states such as Colorado, Minnesota, and Vermont all have seen their appropriations decrease by 25 percent or more.

Public colleges typically react to funding cuts by hiking tuition. This certainly has occurred - overall tuition revenue per student at state colleges has risen 24 percent over the past half decade, according to a recent report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers.

As Congress works to finalize legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act for the next five years, higher education lobbyists are making one last ditch effort to dissuade lawmakers from requiring colleges to provide even the most basic information about how they spend their own institutional financial aid dollars.

At issue are provisions in both the House and Senate reauthorization bills that aim to provide prospective students, their families, and policymakers with more detailed data about their aid policies, as well as other types of consumer information, such as graduation and retention rates. Both bills ask colleges to report the average amount of grant aid that the institutions award their students and the proportion of students who receive these grants. The House legislation goes a much-needed step further, and requires colleges to provide a breakdown by income of students who receive institutional aid.

The two bills also differ on how this consumer information is to be reported. Under the House measure, colleges would be required to provide the data to the Education Secretary who would then publish it on the U.S. Education Department's College Navigator website, which the agency hopes prospective students will use when picking colleges. In contrast, the consumer reporting provisions in the Senate bill would be completely voluntary. Colleges that chose to participate would publish the information on their websites, using a model form developed by the Education Department.