Previewing The Higher Ed Act

Career College Central summary:

Various higher education groups have put forward their initial recommendations for how Congress might consider rewriting the Higher Education Act, if and when lawmakers actually get around to considering the main federal law governing federal programs for students and higher education.
Given recent history and the legislative gridlock in this city, Congress may not actually renew the law until President Obama’s successor is in office. But the education committee House of Representatives at least got the process started by requesting advice — and in response to a Friday deadline its leaders set, college and other groups flooded the panel with recommendations for revising the law.
Exhaustively cataloging and categorizing the various proposals will take days, if not more. But consider this article a first pass at identifying some of the key issues and ideas that a range of higher ed groups want to put on the table for Congress.
Not surprisingly, the proposals read in many cases like wish lists – frequently for Congress to authorize more spending for key programs (Pell Grants, work study, funds for minority institutions, etc.).
There are areas of broad agreement – for imposing tougher requirements on states to do their part to finance higher education, for instance, and for reinstating year-round Pell Grants – and some significant areas of acknowledged disagreement, such as whether the desire for comparable data about student progress in higher education outweigh privacy concerns in arguing for a federal database of student academic progress.

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