A Real Opportunity for Higher Education

Miles Lasater:

Congress and the administration have recently been talking a lot about access to and affordability of higher education. The administration has proposed an ambitious overhaul of our entire higher-education system, including the development of a college scorecard to ensure that students and their families have all of the information they need to make an informed decision about their postsecondary education.

The college scorecard will be hugely useful for families only if the data used to create it are readily available and accurate. Innovative technology companies have already developed this technology and have been collecting and analyzing student and institution data and can be an effective partner to policymakers in creating a scorecard and other higher-education policies that will help families with one of the biggest financial decisions they will make.

The Higher Education Act, the federal law that governs all higher education, was first enacted in 1965 to pave the way for millions of students to access higher education. Once a vehicle of access to higher education, the law is now more than 1,000 pages long and has most recently been a barrier to innovation. The Higher Education Act includes pages and pages of regulations added during the 2008 reauthorization that have never been enforced. If Congress continues down this path, the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, due next year, will likely create hundreds of pages of more regulations that are never enforced and programs that are never funded.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 3, 2013 12:43 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas