INSIDE HIGHER ED.  JUNE 17, 2013.  The Education Department is hoping to streamline its process for reviewing and recognizing accrediting agencies to focus more on what it considers key criteria — 25 of the 95 factors that include accreditors’ standards and how they are applied, as well as the agencies’ fiscal health. While the streamlined standards won’t be in effect for another two years, they’re likely to be a relief to accrediting agencies, who have grumbled in recent years that the department has grown increasingly “granular” in evaluating accreditors for official recognition.

“This will result in a better, more targeted process that is simpler and less burdensome for accrediting agencies, NACIQI and the federal government,” Martha Kanter, the under secretary of education, wrote in a blog post. “It is our hope and expectation that these improvements will also enable the postsecondary institutions they accredit to focus additional time and effort on quality enhancement and value.”

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION.  JUNE 17, 2013.  At the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities’convention in Las Vegas last year, a vendor’s booth in the exhibit hall featured a scantily clad woman in a mermaid costume who was dangling her tail into a giant water tank. In 2011, when Apscu held its convention outside Dallas, attendees could get their photographs taken with a real steer.

The most extravagant it got in the exhibit hall for the 2013 annual convention was a golf-swing simulator. The de-glitzing of the convention hall was all part of the tone that Apscu’s president, Steve Gunderson, is trying to foster for the association.

Mr. Gunderson said the group had asked vendors to exhibit with “conduct appropriate for the higher-education sector.”

It even put extra language in its contract giving the association the right to reject displays that were “prejudicial or defamatory to the image and/or reputation of Apscu and/or its members.”

The contract also stipulated: “Exhibitors who use costumed persons or mannequins should be sure that their manner of appearance and dress are such as not to offend even the most critical.”

There was at least one costumed attendee, courtesy of a vendor called the Tribeca Marketing Group. Despite being located in Florida, it was apparently trying to play on the theme of its New York City name with a person dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Hey, at least that’s patriotic.

Although overall attendance at the convention this year was down from the previous year, both in college representatives (about 1,000 this year versus 1,600 last year) and among exhibitors (800 to 900 this year versus 1,000 last year), the roster of attendees included some notable guests. Among them was Lois C. Greisman, a top official in the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

The FTC, partly at the behest of several U.S. senators, is now “actively engaged” in monitoring marketing practices by for-profit colleges, Ms. Greisman said. She spoke at a panel, attended by 50-plus people, on the rising level of scrutiny of how third-party marketing companies hired by for-profit colleges are conducting their recruiting.

Later she toured the exhibit hall, paying particular attention to those marketing companies, as well as vendors who sell services designed to screen out marketers who fail to comply with the rules.

Any increase in compliance, she asked one of the latter?

“We’ve seen a lot of people talking about it,” he replied.

INSIDE HIGHER ED.  JUNE 17, 2013. The budget bill for California higher education for the coming year will include increased reporting requirements, but not a direct linkage between increased funding and accomplishing certain goals, The Los Angeles Times reported. Governor Jerry Brown had wanted public higher education — as a condition of more money — to improve graduation rates, enroll more low income students and freeze tuition. But higher education leaders said that those goals might not be possible given the severity of budget cuts over the last decade. Legislators generally accepted that argument.

MILITARY.COM.  JUNE 13, 2013.  The chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee expressed frustration on Wednesday with what he sees as the lack of positive movement by for-profit schools in its dealings with military personnel it recruits into online degree programs.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., hit the for-profit education industry hard during the hearing, which included testimony from an Iraq War veteran that his for-profit employer considered Tuition Assistance for servicemembers “the military gravy train” for these schools.

Durbin said lawmakers will now try to force changes through appropriations rather than authorizations, which is the responsibility of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“It’s not easy, but Sen. [Jack] Reed, who is No. 2 on Armed Services, and others, feel very strongly about this, and so we may be able to put something together,” Durbin told reporters after the hearing. Another key ally is Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who two years ago with then-Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., highlighted concerns over the for-profits schools.

“We’re going to be reauthorizing the Higher Education Act with [Senate Education Committee] Chairman Harkin this next year, so that’s a chance to get into this in more detail,” Durbin said.

Durbin said the government appropriates nearly $570 million annually for the Tuition Assistance program used by servicemembers to take online courses, and that he remains frustrated that for-profit schools continue their aggressive recruiting of troops, regardless of whether the servicemember is able to follow through on the study program.

According to government figures, 12 percent of all college students attend for-profit schools. For-profits receive 25 percent of all federal aid to education, but for-profits also account for 47 percent of all student loan defaults. Durbin also cited figures showing that for-profits spend on average about 22 percent on marketing and recruiting and only about 17 percent on instruction — their actual mission. On average, the schools apply about 19 percent toward profits.

“What I worry about someone … who signs up for some worthless school, something where the diploma, if it ever happens, doesn’t take you anywhere,” Durbin said.

An Iraq War veteran who worked as a military student recruiter for a for-profit school in 2008 and 2009 told the committee that his employer relied heavily on Tuition Assistance for servicemembers and that putting “asses in classes” was the school’s internal mantra.

Christopher Neiweem said the school, DeVry University Online, seemed to care little about whether the military student succeeded or failed once enrolled, or what other obligations the student had. Advising deployed troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere to “sit out” a session and pick up again later drew rebukes from bosses, he said.

“Management scolded me,” he told the committee, “insisting ‘DoD does not pay your paycheck anymore. We do, and we must remain competitive.’ ”

DeVry officials were not at the committee hearing, but in a statement to Military.com said: “Veterans and active-duty military personnel choose DeVry University for the same reason as other non-traditional students — we offer quality academics and student services with flexibility to meet their busy schedules.”

The for-profit schools were represented in general by the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities. Association President Steve Gunderson said that for-profit schools reach a segment of the population for whom traditional college is not possible, often because of cost.

In addition to servicemembers, 64 percent of students at for-profit schools are low income. Also, 31 percent are single parents and 46 percent are minorities.

Gunderson said he was once told that “there are good and bad schools in every element of higher education,” and that if he finds a for-profit school doing something wrong, he lets its officials know the association will not defend it.

But Durbin rejected the defense, saying public schools also have high numbers of low-income and minority students, but also have better records of degree completions and employment afterward. He also said the association’s accreditation system is largely meaningless, recalling that when one of the largest schools was caught attempting to defraud the government a few years ago, the association’s response was to warn the school not to engage in fraud again.

“That was the punishment,” Durbin said. “If your industry does not establish credible standards of excellence and quality, you are covering up for the bad guys. That’s what it boils down to.”

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION.  JUNE 14, 2013.  Gov. Jerry Brown has dropped his proposal to tie some money for California’s public universities to such requirements as freezing tuition for four years, improving graduation rates, and enrolling more low-income students and more transfer students, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Officials of the University of California and California State University had opposed those conditions, which Governor Brown, a Democrat, included in his budget proposal for 2013-14, unveiled in January. The university officials argued that the conditions were too rigid and unrealistic after years of budget cuts, and key lawmakers agreed.

As a result of this week’s budget deal, the Times reported, universities will be required simply to track the number of low-income students they have, the percentage of students who finish within four or six years, the number graduating with engineering and computer degrees, and several other statistics.

The $96.3-billion spending plan is scheduled for a vote in the Legislature on Friday. It contains $250-million more than last year for each university system and no financial penalties. Both systems said they were already making progress on the governor’s benchmarks.

INSIDE HIGHER ED.  JUNE 14, 2013.  To hear members of Congress tell it, reauthorizing the Higher Education Act is looming on the near horizon of the legislative agenda — even though most others here consider it a mirage that’s still years away. But when lawmakers do sit down to rewrite the law governing financial aid programs, accreditation will be under a particularly harsh spotlight.

That was clear at a hearing Thursday of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s subcommittee on higher education and workforce training, where a panel featured two representatives of accrediting agencies and two critics of traditional accreditation.

Members of Congress of both parties seemed to agree more with the critics, saying they were skeptical that traditional accreditation was flexible enough to respond to new developments in higher education. And panelists themselves didn’t pull any punches, leveling familiar charges against the traditional peer review system of accreditation that appear to be finding an increasingly receptive audience among policy makers.

Accreditation has been under increasing scrutiny in Washington for most of the past decade. During the second term of the Bush administration, former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings pursued changes to accreditation through regulation.

A federal panel overseeing accreditors offered its own suggestions for overhauling the system in a report issued last year, and a proposal is circulating on Capitol Hill — so far without much traction — to urge accreditors to develop a more flexible system of approval for new entrants to the higher education market.

Accreditation conveys a range of benefits for colleges and universities, but for many, its most important role is serving as a gateway to federal financial aid programs.

The last time around, it was Congress that pushed back on the Education Department’s attempts to change accreditation. This time, lawmakers seem open to an overhaul — an idea often discussed but frequently dismissed as either impractical or politically impossible.

Both Representative Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the subcommittee, and Rubén Hinojosa, the Texas Democrat who is its ranking member, emphasized that traditional accreditation could do better at dealing with competency-based learning, massive open online courses and other innovations. Other members of Congress, especially Republicans, emphasized their concerns about what it costs institutions to pursue and keep accreditation.

President Obama entered the accreditation debate in February, in documents that accompanied the State of the Union address. The president called for changes to the criteria accreditors use to evaluate colleges to pay more attention to price and value, or for the creation of a new path to federal financial aid based on “performance and results.”

Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation, offered a blueprint for changes to the existing accreditation system and for the creation of a new system of approval for nontraditional providers. Accreditors should offer multiple tiers of accreditation to convey differences in quality, and documents from the accreditation process should be made public, Carey said.

He also called for an “accreditation fee” that colleges would pay directly to the Education Department, rather than to accreditors, to avoid what he described as the conflict of interest inherent in a system in which colleges are reviewed by a voluntary body to which they pay membership fees. The department would then distribute the money to accreditors based on volume but also on performance — giving the federal government greater powers over accrediting agencies than it has now.

For nontraditional providers — Carey used the example of a Nobel Prize-winning physician who wanted to create an online physics curriculum — he urged a new system of course-level accreditation that would make those courses eligible for federal financial aid. Courses and programs would have to provide more information about student learning outcomes, and students would receive less financial aid than the per-course average for a traditional student — a way policy approaches could be used to drive down the price of highe education, Carey said.

Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and a longtime critic of accreditation, argued for breaking the link between accreditation and federal student aid, instead requiring colleges to be audited for financial stability and disclose data to the Education Department about student success.

While they appeared to agree with Carey’s critique, Congressional Republicans seemed wary of increasing the Education Department’s power over colleges. And some Democrats were skeptical of Neal’s claim that disclosure alone would be enough to control quality in higher education.

“We put a lot of transparency in the last higher ed bill, but unfortunately we don’t see that driving a lot of consumer decisions,” said Representative John Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat.

The representatives of accrediting organizations — Michale McComis, executive director of the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, a national accreditor; and Elizabeth Sibolski, president of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education — argued that the peer review system of accreditation is critical and that accreditors are working to promote innovation and create more flexible options for approval.

One frequent criticism of accreditation is it relies too much on “input” measures — such as the proportion of professors with Ph.D.s — rather than “outputs,” such as evidence of whether students are learning. But McComis said that while measuring outcomes are important, measuring inputs also provides valuable information about best practices. “To take away the regulatory or the oversight component seems counterintuitive,” he said.”There’s no evidence that institutions alone are going to produce any more quality or meet any more expectations than accreditation has been intended to produce.”

Middle States is in discussions with several of its institutional members about approving competency-based direct assessment programs, in which students are awarded credit based on what they’ve learned, not how much time they’ve spent in class, Sibolski said — a clear attempt to answer the critique that innovation is not occurring under the current system. And she said the accreditor is aware of concerns about cost and speed in accreditation and is attempting to streamline its process.

The question, she said, is how to ensure “you’re doing a thorough job and still make sure that it is cost- effective and timely –  that’s a tough thing to try to negotiate.”

THE HILL.  JUNE 12, 2013. The Obama administration should abandon plans to enact regulations meant to target career training programs that saddle students with debt but fail to help them land a job, a pair of House Republicans said Wednesday.

The controversial rule, directed at for-profit schools, would deny the institutions access to federal student aid if they fail to meet certain benchmarks showing that an adequate number of graduates are able to repay their loans.

A federal judge struck down an attempt to enact the provisions last year, but the Department of Education this week signaled its intent to keep pursuing the measure. The decision has roiled some lawmakers, who argue would hurt the school, the students and the economy.

Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), who chairs the panel’s higher education subcommittee, noted that Congress has repeatedly voted against the proposal and called the administration’s continued support for the rule “disgraceful.”

“Members on both sides of the aisle have expressed concerns that by imposing arbitrary requirements on proprietary colleges, this reckless mandate would reduce access for students, destroy jobs, and undermine the strength of the American workforce,” the lawmakers said Wednesday in a statement,

“By refusing to acknowledge these serious consequences, the administration is once again choosing to pursue its own failed agenda instead of working with Congress to find a better solution,” they wrote.

The Education Department announced via a notice published Wednesday in the Federal Register that it was forming a rulemaking committee to draft revised gainful employment regulations and put out a call for nominees to serve on the panel.

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION.  JUNE 12, 2013.  Two Democratic senators used a Congressional hearing on Wednesday to condemn for-profit colleges as preying on active members of the armed forces to receive federal tuition aid by increasing enrollments but ignoring academic quality.

At the hearing, before the defense appropriations subcommittee, Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island called for stricter accreditation standards and criticized for-profit universities like DeVry as using slick marketing tactics to get a larger cut of federal dollars.

The hearing seemed to revive Senator Durbin’s efforts to pressure the for-profit sector to increase value for military members after he tried last year to reduce the percentage of federal dollars those universities could keep as income.

Now Mr. Durbin focused on improving standards at the universities eligible to receive the $568-million that the U.S. Department of Defense budgets for military tuition assistance.

“This program needs to be improved, and I think it can be,” he said. “We need to take a hard look, starting with accreditation. Some of these schools should not be accredited. There ought to be some policing” within the for-profit sector.

Federal law makes military tuition assistance an exception to the “90/10″ rule, which allows for-profit colleges to receive no more than 90 percent of their revenue from federal sources. That exception has led Democratic lawmakers to raise their eyebrows at the high number of service members at those colleges.

Testimony at the hearing most critical of for-profit colleges came from Christopher Neiweem, an Iraq War veteran who worked as a recruiter for DeVry University. Mr. Neiweem said management at DeVry scolded recruiters if they could not persuade service members and veterans to enroll, creating “a business culture that emphasized hasty enrollment over student needs.”

“It’s a profit-driven industry,” he said. If applicants “had an objection, we were supposed to work through it.”

In a response after the hearing, a DeVry spokesman, Ernie Gibble, said that “veterans and active-duty military personnel choose DeVry University for the same reason as other nontraditional students—we offer quality academics and student services with flexibility to meet their busy schedules.”

Steve Gunderson, president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, a trade group of for-profit institutions, contended at the hearing that poor-performing universities existed in every part of higher education and that the senators were demonizing the for-profit sector.

Mr. Gunderson, a former congressman, also cited the federal government’s insufficient data-collection systems as a barrier to proving which colleges had served students best, and denied that for-profit colleges had a financial incentive to enroll service members.

Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, urged the Defense Department to work more closely with the U.S. Department of Education to track colleges’ performance.

“All of us have come to realize in the last few years,” he said, “that there was not the attention paid to the outcomes and the impact on the individual service members that I think we should have.”

INSIDE HIGHER ED.  JUNE 12, 2013.  The U.S. Department of Education plans this fall to begin a stand-alone round of negotiated rule making on “gainful employment” regulations, which would keep tabs on vocational programs at for-profit colleges and some nonprofit institutions. The department’s plan to pursue a new set of regulations, given that a federal judge struck down the original version last year, is not a surprise. But in an announcement in the Federal Register this week, the Education Department said it planned to hold separate discussions on gainful employment this fall, rather than as part of a broader rule-making session that might also tackle fraud protection or state authorization of distance education.

The federal court ruled that the department had failed to adequately establish justification for the threshold it set for loan repayment rates. (The other standards dealt with debt-to-income ratios.) However, the judge said the department was on firm ground philosophically in its effort to regulate the return on investment of vocational programs. But the Obama administration appears to have chosen to take another run at crafting a new set of rules rather than trying to resuscitate the old ones in court.

Gainful employment was a long, bruising battle. For-profits and some Republican lawmakers had asked that a new debate over how to regulate vocational programs be folded into the renewal of the Higher Education Act, which is scheduled to expire this year. By pursuing a new round of rule making on gainful employment, the department appears to be continuing to focus primarily on for-profits , in contrast to proposed legislation that would scrutinize employment outcomes of higher education more broadly. The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the sector’s primary trade group, issued a written statement saying it was disappointed by the prospect of a “repeated, faulty and confrontational process” on gainful employment. The department will select members of the committee, which is slated to meet first in September.

APSCU.  JUNE 11, 2013.  Today, APSCU President and CEO Steve Gunderson released a statement following the U.S. Department of Education’s announcement that they will establish a negotiated rulemaking committee for consideration of gainful employment.

“We are extremely disappointed that the U.S. Department of Education intend to establish a negotiated rulemaking committee for consideration of gainful employment.  The Department’s decision to announce this as their first solitary rule-making initiative creates all the fears of a repeated, faulty and confrontational process when we should all be working together to provide the career education that leads to real jobs, with real incomes. This action goes against the request of members of Congress, as well as other higher education stakeholders, to wait until Congress sets the course for Higher Education Reauthorization.

“Since the Department opted not to yield to this advice, they must not repeat the biased and tainted regulatory process that resulted in the flawed gainful employment regulation rejected by the U.S. District Court.

“As recently as April, Senators Burr and Coburn sent a letter to Education Secretary Duncan requesting an update on the Department’s implementation of the Inspector General’s suggested corrective actions for improving transparency and proper management of the negotiated rulemaking process.  Specifically, the Senators asked for an update on Department policies related to:

• communication with outside parties during rulemaking;
• public disclosure of contact with outside parties after negotiated rulemaking sessions end;
• confidential financial disclosures by Department employees working on rulemaking that impact publicly-traded entities.

“If we are going down this well-worn path once again, then we hope that the participants selected as negotiators represent the viewpoints of all the parties involved in postsecondary education, so that the Department can benefit from hearing a variety of differing viewpoints.  The Department cannot put forth a regulation that stifles education innovation, costs jobs and displaces the students who benefit most from career and job focused training.”