Higher Ed Watch

It’s not often that you see members of Congress (or anyone for that matter) defending a college with a zero percent graduation rate. But that is exactly what is happening for Oregon’s Marylhurst University. Both of the state’s Senators and three of its representatives recently wrote a letter to the Department of Education defending the University against claims from the Department’s own College Scorecard that it has a 0% graduation rate.

Zero percent is certainly at odds with the rhetoric on the website of this small, open-admission, Catholic liberal arts school. Student success is in the first sentence of a lengthy and passionate case for cultivating ethical, engaged leaders capable of taking on the challenges of a rapidly changing world.

But talk is cheap and self-promotion is easy, which is why Republicans and Democrats have been calling for better, more comparable data that students can use to inform their college-decision making processes. Marylhurst, however, isn’t alone in tooting its horn. The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning recognized the university as a national leader for its "outstanding commitment to the expansion of lifelong learning opportunities and for innovative efforts to improve access and quality in academic programs for adult learners."

It turns out that adult learners are the problem. Or, more accurately, how the federal government counts (or doesn’t count) adult learners. The College Scorecard reports graduation rate data only of first time, full time students. However, just three percent of Marylhurst’s students fall into that category. The vast majority are working adults taking upper division courses part time in order to complete a degree started elsewhere. And these students seem to be doing well. Out of 911 undergrads enrolled last year, 204 graduated. But the success of these students doesn’t count, at least not according to the federal government.[i] Disregarding the majority of students at an institution is not fair. Not fair to the institution, not fair to students.

Borrowers with defaulted federal student loans received a rare bit of good news last week: the Obama administration put an end to a policy that improperly enticed loan collection companies to demand excessive payments from borrowers to “rehabilitate” their loans.

Starting this month, the U.S. Department of Education is providing a flat rate commission to the nearly two dozen firms with which it contracts to collect on defaulted loans. These companies will now make the same amount of fees regardless of whether they get a borrower to pay back $5, $50, or $250 per month.

Under federal law, borrowers who default can rehabilitate their loans if they make nine “reasonable and affordable” payments on-time over ten months – clearing their credit records and making them once again eligible for federal student aid. The statute bars collection agencies from demanding minimum payments based on the original loan amounts. Instead, they are supposed to take a borrower’s financial circumstances into account when determining how much that individual can handle each month.

The Education Department’s policy, however, encouraged collectors to demand larger payments than borrowers were legally obligated to pay. According to Bloomberg News, which was the first to report on the Department’s changed policy, here’s how it worked:

“Do more with less.” Many universities could emblazon their crests with this motto to reflect their 21^st century operational—if not inspirational—ethos. With not one but two recessions to begin the new millennium, the economic environment has not exactly been conducive to rapid expansion. Yet, that is exactly what has taken place for colleges and universities across the United States. Between 2000 and 2010 degree production increased across most institutional types; likewise, spending increased even as subsidies from state and local governments decreased (students footed the bill). During roughly the same time period, the number of postsecondary instructional staff grew over 30% (by about 380,000 instructors). The lion’s share of these new instructor positions have taken the form of part-time and graduate appointments, which command far less compensation for their work than full-time faculty and are virtually all ineligible for tenure. This development of an underclass of university faculty is quickly approaching a boiling point, and the implications for effective faculty governance are troubling.

A federal district court judge dealt a huge blow yesterday to the U.S. Department of Education’s efforts to regulate the for-profit college sector. More broadly, the court’s decision in the case, which deals with the Department’s Gainful Employment regulations, could make it much more difficult to bring greater transparency and accountability to higher education as a whole.

The roots of this case go back to June when the federal district court vacated some of the Department of Education’s Gainful Employment (GE) regulations. While the judge affirmed the department’s authority to regulate on GE and held up requirements that GE programs disclose information like median debt to students, he found that one of the three measures used to determine whether a program prepared students for gainful employment -- the student loan repayment rate -- “lacked a reasoned basis.” And since the judge concluded that all the metrics were intertwined, he threw them all out. With no metrics to report, the disclosure requirements included in the regulations were also effectively eliminated.

The Department went back to the court and asked the judge to reinstate the reporting requirements so that it could implement the disclosure provisions of GE (without program-level information, disclosure would be impossible to achieve). In yesterday’s decision, the judge denied this request on the grounds that the reporting requirements would violate one of the worst laws in the history of higher education: the federal ban on a student unit record system.