Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that he will step down at the end of December. He was one the last remaining original cabinet appointees and will have served six years.
His family recently returned to Chicago, where Duncan ran public schools for several years before his appointment as Secretary of Education. During his tenure, Duncan repeatedly clashed with teachers unions, parents, and Congress through initiatives like Common Core and support of charter schools.
Former New York state commissioner John King, a deputy secretary at the agency for the last few months, will take his place.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) turns fifty today and is kicking off a year long celebration. Fifty years ago, on September 29, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 at a White House Rose Garden ceremony.
The law created the National Endowment for the Humanities as an independent federal agency, the first grand public investment in American culture. It identified the need for a national cultural agency that would preserve America’s rich history and cultural heritage, and encourage and support scholarship and innovation in history, archeology, philosophy, literature, and other humanities disciplines.
In the five decades since, NEH has made more than 63,000 grants totaling $5.3 billion, including leveraging an additional $2.5 billion in matching grants to bring the best humanities research, public programs, education, and preservation projects to the American people. Examples of NEH impact include funding that has led to the discovery of a lost Jamestown settlement fort, brought the scholarship of famed linguist Deborah Tannen to a broader audience, created the first museum exhibit of the now cultural icon King Tut, preserved the papers of ten presidents including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, invested in the career of then relatively unknown documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, and thousands of other examples.
Go to 50.neh.gov to see highlights the top grant projects from NEH’s history. Learn about the role NEH grants have played in:
The House and Senate have introduced bipartisan legislation to extend the Perkins program, which is set to expire in less than one week.
On the House side, Reps. Mike Bishop (R-MI) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) introduced bi-partisan legislation extending the authorization of the Perkins Loan Program, which is similar to a measure the duo introduced in June t. The measure, HR 3594, Higher Education Extension Act of 2015, is expected to be considered and passed by the House next week.
Additionally, four Senate HELP Committee members introduced a bipartisan resolution today “expressing support for the continuation of the Federal Perkins Loan Program.” Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Rob Portman (R-OH), Robert P. Casey, Jr. (D-PA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) introduced a measure to express support to extend the Perkins program for this year. The introduction of the resolution signals broad support by the Senate to reauthorize the Perkins program for a year.
Perkins, the $1 billion campus-based loan program for exceptionally needy students, is just six days from expiring. While it has many backers in both chambers of Congress, most Republicans – including the House and Senate education committee chairmen – have shown no inclination to extend the program beyond Sept. 30.
The cost of the extension (approximately $250 million) will be paid for by limiting the grandfather clause, in that “grandfathered students” will only be able to take out Perkins loans through March 31, 2018 instead of throughout their entire academic career.
With the introduction of the pay-for and the bipartisan Senate resolution, the extending the program may move forward.
Over the weekend, the Obama Administration had two major announcements for higher ed, first the new College Scorecard and the inclusion of Prior Prior Year for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).
College Scorecard
The Administration launched their new College Scorecard, which rather than rank colleges as previously attempted, incorporates numbers new data points on colleges going back for several years so that individuals can make personal decisions as to a college’s value. It is a scaled back attempt at what the Administration has announced previously. Information published includes annual cost, average graduation rate, median salary after attending, average financial aid and debt, as well as demographic breakdown of the school and average SAT and ACT scores.
The new College Scorecard data does not rank colleges, but shows the share of a college’s former students who make some progress in paying down their federal loans within the first three years after leaving college. Additionally, the Scorecard provides the first comprehensive look at how much students, who receive federal loans and Pell Grants end up earning after they leave a specific college, both in the short term and long term, and if that is above or below the earning potential with simply a high school education. At present, the Scorecard includes the federal graduation rate, which only captures first-time, full-time students. The Administration has publicly committed to include a dedicated link to Student Achievement Measure (SAM) data on the Scorecard as soon as practicable. The Administration’s incorporation of the SAM, which is a long-term effort of APLU and the UW participates in SAM, opens the metrics up to tracking student movement across postsecondary institutions to provide a more complete picture of undergraduate student progress and completion within the higher education system. SAM is an alternative to the federal graduation rate, which is limited to tracking the completion of first-time, full-time students at one institution.
One criticism at the new system is that the government’s new earnings data reflects only the achievements of students who received federal financial aid, which could significantly skew the data and either understate possibly overstate the actual median earnings of a college’s former students.
Nationally, the federal student loan repayment rates underscore that hundreds of colleges are producing large numbers of graduates (as well as dropouts) who are not technically in default on their loans but are nonetheless not making any progress in repaying their debt. At present, the government only holds colleges responsible only when their former students get so far behind on their loans that they default on their loan debt. The new data also shows, according to the White House, that at 53 percent of all institutions of higher education, fewer than half of former students are earning more than the typical high school graduate.
Prior-Prior Year
Additionally, the Administration announced that students applying for federal financial aid can do so three months earlier next year. Beginning October 2016, students will be allowed to use prior-prior year tax data to determine financial contribution and eligibility. Right now, students have to wait until after their parents file their current year tax returns. The move will allow students to use tax information from two years earlier that is received electronically through the IRS rather than waiting until after the new year and the current year’s tax calculation.
Allowing millions of students to apply for federal financial aid three months earlier using prior-prior year tax data will cost about $400 million in the first year due to an expected additional 50,000 students getting federal aid and enrolling in college.
Such a policy change has broad support in Congress, but Republicans have also expressed concern over the potential cost. Additionally, Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has expressed support for prior-prior year, but has stated it needs to originate from the higher education reauthorization and not an administrative move.
The Senate HELP Committee’s will hold another hearing related to the Higher Education Act reauthorization today. This hearing will focus on combating campus sexual assault. Sexual assault is one of four key areas for which Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-WA) established staff working groups to guide the committee’s reauthorization process. Sen. Alexander is in Tennessee today due to an unexpected conflict, and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) will lead the hearing in his absence. Much of the focus of the hearing, indirectly, will be on the Senate’s Campus Accountability and Safety Act (CASA) legislation, which was introduced last Congress and again this year.
There will be two panels at the hearing today. First up, CASA sponsors Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) Dean Heller (R-NV), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) will speak on much-discussed CASA bill. A second panel will feature safety advocates and higher education officials: Dana Bolger, Co-founder of Know Your IX; Dolores Stafford, Executive Director of the National Association of Clery Compliance Officers and Professionals and President and CEO of D. Stafford & Associates; and Mollie Benz Flounlacker, Associate Vice President for Federal relations at the Association of American Universities. University of California President Janet Napolitano will also testify about the bill – which includes provisions she supports and others she takes issue with – and the need to improve existing laws.