A Generation Later, We Still Haven’t Updated the Nation’s Higher Education Law
The second of my three children — a 10th grader — has embarked on her college journey. She has taken the PSAT, compiled a list of schools she’s interested in, and is trying to cram her junior-year schedule with challenging classes. The college admissions whirlwind — for her and for me — is beginning.
In addition to my role as a proud mom, I also lead a nonprofit organization focused on college completion during a time of immense change in higher education. My daughter is where my two worlds collide. Because she was born in 2008 — the last time Congress reauthorized the Higher Education Act (HEA), I used to call her “my HEA baby.” Now, she’s “my HEA teenager.”
During her lifetime, which has taken her from preschool to high school, the world has been transformed. We have lived through the Great Recession and a global pandemic. BlackBerrys and 3G wireless gave way to ChatGPT and driverless cars. Ever-widening political divisions hardened the nearly intractable gridlock in Washington. Throughout all of these major shifts over the past 16 years, our federal government has been unable to update the nation’s primary higher education law to meet the needs of a rapidly changing nation.
The Higher Education Act governs federal programs that affect the nation’s colleges and universities. It regulates financial aid to students, federal aid to institutions, and teacher preparation programs. First passed into law in 1965, the HEA has been reauthorized eight times to stay abreast of changes in higher education and society. But because the HEA has not been reauthorized since my second child was born, it remains lodged in a previous era, unable to address the crises of cost, access, attainment, and completion that our nation must solve.
It’s critical that Congress put aside its most partisan convictions, find common ground, and reauthorize a law that can help more students get into, pay for and complete college, and earn the credentials that can improve their lives and increase the prosperity of the nation.
A reauthorized HEA could link federal funding to college completion, an area where we must generate dramatic improvements. Only 54% of Americans between 25 and 64 hold a college degree, certificate, or certification. Millions of students who enroll in the nation’s colleges aren’t graduating. Just 42% who enroll in public four-year universities finish in four years. At public community colleges, fewer than 20% earn their degrees in two years.
As Complete College America argues in its latest report, state funding to public colleges and universities should be based on how successful these institutions are at graduating a diverse population of students. Federal funding should follow suit. Under this new model, we call completion-goals funding, institutions should receive greater funding up front to invest in proven success strategies that produce more equitable outcomes. The strategies that help get learners to the finish line on time include having full-time students complete 15 credit hours each semester, offering corequisite support for gateway courses, and building clear pathways that lead directly to career goals.
Congress certainly has the stomach to discuss reauthorization. Consider the College Cost Reduction Act, which emerged from the House Education and Workforce Committee in January. The bill, considered a significant step toward reauthorizing HEA, contains several worthwhile provisions.
Among them, the bill retains the Federal Supplemental Education Opportunity Grant, which has been threatened with elimination. This grant program helps 1.7 million undergraduates with exceptional financial needs pay for college and graduate with less debt. It puts more emphasis on student outcomes by sending additional support to institutions that successfully graduate low-income students and propel them into careers that improve their life prospects. And it increases transparency around college affordability for students and families by including costs and outcomes in the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard and creating a standardized financial aid offer letter to be used by all institutions.
The bipartisan College Transparency Act goes a step further. It proposes to collect a more comprehensive range of student data to identify institutional performance gaps so schools and governments can address them. Federal funding linked to data can reveal where the real needs of both students and institutions lie.
Too often, institutions with sufficient staff and infrastructure to scout for federal support and write grant proposals are the ones who receive assistance. The institutions that need the most federal support are often the ones that lack the resources to seek it out. It’s a good policy to open competitions for federal dollars to all institutions. But if we can view federal support through an equity lens and send that support to where the numbers say it’s needed, we can generate better and more equitable outcomes.
Congress must find bipartisan agreement to provide colleges and their students with the support and guidance they need in the context of a modern society — not one still stuck in a 2008 mindset. HEA reauthorization is long overdue. The process should be swift, yet strategic, and shouldn’t take so long that by the time it’s completed, I have an “HEA adult child” or worse still, an “HEA grandchild!"
