US Republicans threaten college cost pressures

The Republican majority in the US House of Representatives has given an initial round of approval to legislation designed to hold down college costs through steps that include forcing institutions to reimburse the government for unpaid student loans.

The measure, titled the College Cost Reduction Act, was approved on a series of nearly complete party-line votes in the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The bill runs more than 200 pages, touching on numerous hot-button political debates in US higher education, many of them involving student loans and institutional financing, but also including such topics as admissions, free speech protections, credit transfer, for-profit limits, campus labour rights, abortion and accreditation.

The overall bill and many of its provisions have little chance of ultimately winning approval in the Democrat-led Senate or being signed into law by President Joe Biden. Yet some of the elements – especially in areas of institutional accountability – are seen by experts as having at least a chance of enactment as individual bills or parts of other legislation.

In leading the committee’s consideration of the bill, the panel’s chair, Virginia Foxx, insisted on the importance of lawmakers accepting the entire package, saying that higher education needs an intersecting array of multiple policy fixes to make college affordable to students because federal aid increases alone would only encourage institutions to spend more.

“A band-aid simply won’t do,” Ms Foxx said. “What is needed is a complete restructuring of the incentives that drive tuition prices skyward.”

But the committee’s top-ranking Democrat, Bobby Scott, said the bill largely amounts to an attempt to reduce college spending by cutting money for needy students and reducing key elements of government oversight. “The proposal to make college more affordable for students”, he said of the Republican measure, “is to limit how much federal student aid they can access.”

The Republican bill does offer to double the maximum Pell Grant – the main federal subsidy for low-income students – but only for juniors and seniors headed for on-time graduation in a bachelor’s degree programme judged to involve high-paying jobs.

It includes some borrower protections, in areas such as simplifying the repayment process and barring capitalisation – the costly addition of unpaid interest to the student’s underlying debt. But along with requiring colleges to pay back the federal loans of students with low earnings, the bill imposes multiple hindrances to student borrowing.

And – reflecting the Biden administration’s ongoing and heavily promoted campaign to unilaterally cancel more than $130 billion (£100 billion) in student debt owed to the federal government – the bill would bar such forgiveness going forward.

The Republican bill also suggests an open-ended right for campuses with partisan or religious missions to keep their federal aid eligibility without meeting standard accreditor evaluations of the quality or accuracy of their teachings.

“I do wonder whether this means that an institution could refuse to teach evolution, could refuse to teach climate change, because that might go against a religious belief,” said a Democratic member of the committee, Kathy Manning.

Democrats offered a series of 31 amendments aimed at removing such provisions from the bill, and the Republican majority in the House chamber voted them all down. The lone exception to complete party unanimity on both sides was one vote cast by a single Republican, Lori Chavez-Deremer, in support of one Democrat-authored amendment, which attempted to make clear that US universities are allowed to provide accurate information about reproductive health services.

The bill next faces consideration by the entire House of Representatives.

Its prospects seem limited given the strict party-line nature of the approach, said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, a grouping of about 1,000 institutions concerned with the liberal arts.

“Representative Foxx has vowed to place the Biden administration’s education policies under a microscope,” Dr Pasquerella said, with goals that include eliminating the US Department of Education and accreditation agencies, and “measuring a quality education almost exclusively in terms of immediate employability and wages earned”.

“It doesn’t seem there is any way forward without the ability to find common ground or even listen to rational arguments on opposing sides,” she said.

Another expert on US higher education, Robert Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, said he “can imagine” both parties in Congress eventually embracing a few limited elements of the bill that would help students afford college and get more data on institutions, but without the idea of institutions paying back federal loan money.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com