The House Education and Workforce Committee recently marked up a number of proposals concerning higher education. Instead of using the opportunity to address the drivers of tuition inflation or encourage innovation in the higher education sphere, the proposed reforms maintain an open spigot of federal college subsidies.
The package of proposals includes:
1. Simplifying the Application for Student Aid Act
Simplifies the Free Application for Federal Student Aid application and allows students to apply for aid based on income statements from two years prior.
This is intended to streamline the application process and bypass the submission of current income tax data. Under this proposal, FAFSA would also be entirely electronic and allow students to more easily provide their income data through the IRS.
2. Empowering Students Through Enhanced Financial Counseling Act
Institutions that are eligible for federal dollars would be required to offer financial counseling for all students who receive federal student loans or grants under this proposal. Specifically, this proposal aims to enhance a student and parent’s knowledge of their options and responsibilities when participating in the federal student loan program.
The Empowering Students Through Enhanced Financial Counseling Act additionally discourages students from participating in private student loan programs.
3. Strengthening Transparency in Higher Education Act
In order to improve access to institutional data, the Strengthening Transparency in Higher Education Act requires that 26 different categories of information be made available to students on a website called College Navigator.
These data would include a tuition calculator as well as information on federal student loan options. Every student who fills out a FAFSA will receive a link to this website for more information.
The package also includes two proposals to increase support to specific categories of institutions, such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic Serving Institutions.
These proposals aim to address some significant shortcomings in the higher education sector, but miss the mark.
While transparency, affordability, and equality of opportunity must be addressed, the proposed reforms simply ignore the root causes of increases in college costs.
Although the College Navigator has the potential to increase transparency, it is more likely to pick winners and losers in the higher education sphere and serve as a recruiting website for federal student loans.
Instead of tinkering around the margins of a bloated and untenable system of higher education financing, policymakers should consider reforms that limit federal subsidies while better targeting grants to those students most in need. And in order to truly begin to drive down college costs, reforms to our outdated accreditation system to allow students to finance alternatives to the four year brick-and-mortar model, coupled with a restoration of the private lending market, must be on the table.