President George W. Bush last month signed the Higher Education Opportunity Act, a bill aiming to address concerns about the soaring costs of college by streamlining the financial aid process and opening it up to more families.
Its provisions include reforms to the student loan process, expansions of financial aid programs and a flurry of new regulations for colleges and universities.
The law reauthorized the landmark Higher Education Act of 1965, which greatly expanded the federal government's role in higher education and serves as Washington's primary piece of legislation on federal financial aid.
Congress passed the bill's final version on July 31, when the House approved it by a vote of 380-49 and the Senate by a vote of 83-8. Bush signed it into law on Aug. 14.
The measure requires the colleges and universities with the highest tuition inflation to submit detailed information about factors driving their increases. It directs the Department of Education to create a free, user-friendly Web site with this and related information to help families evaluate schools.
Government and higher education officials this week will begin the process of negotiating how to implement the act's reforms.
Congress' goal was "to make the whole college application information and financing process simpler and consumer friendly," according to a Senate aide who requested anonymity due to office policy.
The Web site will contain data comparable to that available from the Princeton Review, a leading test preparation company and source of information on colleges. "Then students and families can vote with their feet," the aide said.
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the U.S. government's form for student financial aid, will be restructured under the act. The government will use information it already has – such as financial data collected by the Internal Revenue Service – instead of requiring applicants to fill out that information themselves in order to simplify the process.
As a result, the online FAFSA form will be simplified and a new, two-page "EZ-FAFSA" will eventually replace the current seven-page paper document.
This summer's bill also expands the federal government's Pell Grant program, which provides need-based funds to students from low-income families. The bill inflates the program so that students can receive aid year-round, rather than just during the academic year, and authorizes higher maximum levels for Pell Grants. It increases the maximum Pell Grant from $4,800 to $6,000 for 2009 and to $8,000 for 2014.
Tufts' Director of Financial Aid Patricia Reilly said that the higher maximum grant allowed by the legislation is an improvement, although legislators have yet to guarantee funding. "About 10 percent of our students get Pell Grants, but it affects everyone because when we get more money from the federal government … it makes the pot for everyone bigger," she said.
The bill also augments financial aid to service members, veterans and their relatives; regulations on the interactions between lenders and college officials; aid to students with intellectual disabilities; and various federal aid programs and their eligibility guidelines, especially for students who pursue certain public service careers.
Reilly had harsh criticism for what she called excessive governmental micromanagement of schools' routine operations.
"The amount of additional reporting requirements and additional regulations in this bill is astounding," she said.
The bill implements controls on textbook pricing and fire safety and new requirements on fighting peer-to-peer file sharing and on offering vaccines, among other provisions.
"There's just a lot of stuff that's been thrown into this one bill," she said. "It's not particularly coherent and it doesn't particularly mesh with what they've done in the past or what we've asked them to do."
Reilly said political wrangling led lawmakers to include more stipulations than had existed in previous reauthorizations of the Higher Education Act.
But the Senate aide defended the legislation, saying that Congress worked closely with colleges in constructing the provisions.
"We took a lot of their advice, and definitely our goal was to make it work," the aide said. In regards to more stringent requirements on cost and price reporting, the aide said that the burden placed on colleges would not be too great.
"We were not mandating they do something, we were mandating they report on something they were already doing," the aide said.
U.S. Reps. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), whose districts include parts of Tufts' Medford/Somerville campus, supported the legislation.
"It contains a number of provisions to help make college more affordable, including … offering grants to part-time students," Capuano said in a statement in February, when the House approved a preliminary version of the bill.
This week marks the beginning of the "negotiated rule making" process, in which the federal agencies that the legislation affects will work with members of the public, including higher education officials, to hammer out the details of how to implement the act and to translate its provisions into actual regulations.
Open hearings will begin in the next few days at six locations around the country. There is no set timeframe for publishing the final regulations, the Senate aide said, but Reilly explained that it could take nearly two years for the whole process to play out.
"At this point it looks like … they'll have the final regulations out in fall of 2009, and we'll probably have to implement [them] in July of 2010," she said. "They're going to have to write very complex regulations."
