Proposed Bill Combines House, Senate Versions of the Higher Education Act
Congressional aides hope to finalize a renewal of the Higher Education Act by Memorial Day that merges different
versions of the proposed bill passed separately by the House of Representatives and the Senate last year, according
to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Compromise Higher-Education Bill Takes Shape in
Congress,” May 14, 2008).
Although the draft of the measure that is circulating Washington does not include provisions on graduate education,
new programs, or private student loans — three of the bill’s 11 sections — the measure is already nearly 700
pages.
The issues that the two houses appear to have reached a compromise on include college cost watch lists,
accreditation, and campus piracy:
- Negotiators hope to give consumers more accurate and useful information about higher education costs by
bolstering current watch lists. These lists, established by the House bill, already identify the most and least
expensive colleges and those with the highest percentage of tuition increases. But under the compromise bill,
institutions with the highest and lowest “net price” would also be listed.
- The current 15 members of the National
Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises the Department of Education on
accreditation, would be replaced with 18 new members, six each appointed by the secretary of education, the Senate,
and the House.
- Colleges would be required to develop plans to detect and prevent illegal downloading of music and videos on
college campuses and to offer alternatives to such illegal downloading.
Issues that are still being negotiated include whether states should be punished for cutting their higher education
budgets, whether textbook publishers and colleges should be required to disclose more information about the costs of
the books, and whether colleges should be required to notify students and employees within 30 minutes of a campus
emergency.
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