Dive Brief:
- As the U.S. Senate works through Higher Education Act re-authorization conversations, questions about access and equity take center stage. But so do questions about what higher education is intended to do, who it is intended to serve or, more broadly, what it even means. And no one can agree on the definitions of success and access, either, said James P. Bergeron, president the National Council of Higher Education Resources and former director of education and human services policy for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and Denise Forte, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, whose background also includes time spent as a staff director for the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
- As the Senate works through Higher Education Act re-authorization conversations, Forte said Tuesday during a "Duke in DC" panel event on The Higher Education Act: A History of Access and the Way Forward that the issues of whether higher education regulation is the job of the federal government, the states or the institutions is compounded by the fact that higher education was originally intended to "maintain a competitive populace" — but the population itself is changing.
- "It used to be that when we talked about access, it was more about money ... and getting more kids into the institutions," she said. Now, there's a need to move from a college-ready, affordability conversation to one that has to talk about supporting first-generation students, older students, students who are single parents — "all of which have different needs ... so access for one person may not be the same as access for another," she added. The conversation has to be much more targeted to how a student is going to stay and be successful in completing their education, more than just how to get students enrolled.
Dive Insight:
Bergeron said he isn't convinced anyone in either chamber of Congress, the Executive Branch or the states is particularly motivated to drive substantive solutions quickly. Instead, he said skeptically, they're "looking at term limits and thinking about legacy" and realizing HEA re-authorization might be the only thing they can tackle to cement their legacies.
Forte said her sense is that any meaningful movement on higher education has to come from the "triad" of the federal government, the states and the institutions, and "we just don't have that" three-pronged push at this time. And both acknowledge the current heavily partisan climate — compounded by a lack of movement on a budget reconciliation bill — makes it very difficult to move anything forward.
"It’s not so much about the policy, although there are some big policy questions that have been coming to the floor around what should Pell really be used for," Forte said. Restrictions on part-time enrollment are particularly behind given the changing profile of today's students, for instance.
But the issue is, "nobody knows what accountability means, honestly," she said. "I do think in this world, access has changed — the idea of what access should do, and I don’t see the PROSPER Act dealing with that, and it’s unclear of whether this re-authorization gets to that."
For its part, the House version of the bill focuses largely on the role of higher education as a workforce development vehicle, which panelists lamented leaves out a huge chunk of what higher ed was intended to do.
But neither Forte nor Bergeron foresees a comprehensive HEA re-authorization bill happening this year; with the Senate's schedule, it seems much more likely that it will be punted to 2019 and the new Congress. And though there is not full consensus on how important the bill is, given how many of the areas important to higher ed are addressed through appropriations bills, the pair agree that there are things the bill will address that will impact the climate for a long time — it may be 2025 or 2030 before we see another re-authorization bill come to pass, Bergeron said.