Institutional Aid

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.

Recent announcements by Harvard and Yale universities to expand financial aid are good news for the small number of students helped, but do little to dispel the impression of an ivory tower still removed from regular people.

Here’s a primer for those who may have missed the flurry of media coverage on the Ivory aid plans. Harvard’s plan, announced in December, would spend $22 million to cap parental contributions at 10 percent of income for all students coming from families making between $120,000 and $180,000 a year. Yale’s new policy, released on Monday, is slightly more complex, using over $24 million to cap parental income contributions to less than 10 percent for families making $120,000 or less, while significantly reducing expected contributions of families making between $120,000 and $200,000. The Yale plan would result in reductions of one-half to one-third for affected families.

Santa has some tough decisions to make this Christmas. We've decided to help him out with our own list of who's been naughty and who's been nice this year in higher education.

Let us know who, if anyone, you think should be added to the list…

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With Congress providing a significant increase in Pell Grant aid, federal lawmakers have some pressing questions to ask colleges about how they spend their institutional aid dollars. Will colleges use the influx of Pell Grant dollars to supplement their aid and insure that low-income students don't have

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Now that Congress has approved a substantial increase in need-based, federal financial aid, it is important that students, families, and policymakers learn more about how colleges are spending their own institutional financial aid dollars. It would be disappointing if the new infusion of need-based, federal financial aid had the unintended…

Note: This post pre-dates Higher Ed Watch's shift to a new publishing system. For the complete original post, including any comments, please click here.

Last week, Congress approved legislation that would transfer more than $20 billion over the next five years from over-subsidized banks to need-based student financial aid. The primary beneficiaries of the legislation are low- and middle-income students whose abilities to enroll in and complete college are restricted…

Note: This post pre-dates Higher Ed Watch's shift to a new publishing system. For the complete original post, including any comments, please click here.

The U.S. News & World Report's annual ranking of colleges and universities, "America's Best Colleges 2008," was published last week with typical fanfare. High school students and their parents likely flipped immediately to the "top schools" ranking, where they found-gasp!-that Princeton University earned the top spot…

Note: This post pre-dates Higher Ed Watch's shift to a new publishing system. For the complete original post, including any comments, please click here.

Limited Impact of Merit Scholarships on Enrollment

A new study conducted by James Monk at the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute found the correlation between merit scholarships and higher yields of targeted students at private colleges may be

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FAFSA Gets a Little Easier

The House and Senate introduced bills to drastically reduce the FAFSA from five pages down to two. Both bills would allow students and their parents to simply check a box on their…

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Negotiated Rulemaking Participants Debate Higher Ed Performance Standards

Three days of negotiated rulemaking on higher education accreditation will end today, with accreditors, college heads, business leaders, and members of the Department of Education discussing what regulatory solutions…

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