| 来源类型 | Report
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| 规范类型 | 报告
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| Regulatory reforms for higher education |
| Andrew P. Kelly
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| 发表日期 | 2017-06-23
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| 出版年 | 2017
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| 语种 | 英语
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| 摘要 | Editor’s note: The next president is in for a rough welcome to the Oval Office given the list of immediate crises and slow-burning policy challenges, both foreign and domestic. What should Washington do? Why should the average American care? We’ve set out to clearly define US strategic interests and provide actionable policy solutions to help the new administration build a 2017 agenda that strengthens American leadership abroad while bolstering prosperity at home.
What to Do: Policy Recommendations for 2017 is an ongoing project from AEI. Click here for access to the complete series, which addresses a wide range of issues from rebuilding America’s military to higher education reform to helping people find work.
Colleges and universities that receive Title IV aid operate under a web of rules and regulations. In light of the $150 billion in grants, loans, and tax credits that the federal government hands out, some regulation of how institutions disburse that money, and the information they must publish about their product, is reasonable and inevitable. As with many areas of federal policy, however, both the density and reach of federal rules governing participating colleges and universities have grown tremendously since the birth of the programs in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of this growth has been productive; greater transparency around student outcomes and the implementation of basic fiduciary standards have helped to reduce fraud and abuse and target policy responses to poorly performing institutions.
But much of the growth reflects the fact that each reauthorization of the Higher Education Act layers new requirements on the higher-education system but rarely subtracts any existing requirements that may have outlived their usefulness (if they were ever useful to begin with). The Department of Education then writes rules to execute those new statutory requirements or, as is increasingly the case, initiates rulemaking that is not related to recently enacted legislation but is designed to promote the administration’s priorities. Add in the sub-regulatory guidance that inevitably follows the regulatory process, and the end result is a system that imposes significant costs on colleges and universities, often with questionable benefits.
Hard and fast estimates of regulatory burden are hard to come by given the wide range of institutions and opaque institutional budgeting practices, but colleges who have conducted self-studies have found that they invest significant time and money in complying with federal requirements. Many of those costs are then passed on to the consumer in the form of higher tuition. For its part, the department tends to underestimate the administrative burden associated with new regulations.
And because agency officials can effectively make policy through new regulations and sub-regulatory guidance — and have considerable discretion in targeting institutions for regulatory action — the system is also plagued by uncertainty and overreach. When control of the executive branch changes, colleges are left to wonder whether sub-regulatory guidance issued by one administration is still in effect under a new one. All of this leads to risk aversion and a compliance mentality on the part of institutions, which increases the amount of time and money they spend to ensure that they are not running afoul of federal policy.
Efforts to cut through the thicket of federal regulation are not new; every few years another task force or commission publishes a study of federal requirements and proposes changes. But new requirements continue to accumulate, and the Department of Education continues to push policy goals through the regulatory process whether or not those goals reflect legislative intent. Needed is an effort to not only reduce and streamline existing rules and requirements, but to reform the processes by which such requirements become policy. With some exceptions, this paper focuses mainly on reforms to the regulatory process rather than the reform or repeal of specific regulations. For more on specific regulations that merit attention, see the report of the 2015 Senate Task Force on federal regulation of higher education.
To view the full chapter, visit: https://nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/uploads/public/doclib/HigherEd_Ch6_Kelly.pdf |
| 主题 | Higher Education
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| 标签 | Center on Higher Education Reform
; Higher education
; What to do policy recommendations on higher education
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| URL | https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/regulatory-reforms-for-higher-education/
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| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States)
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| 资源类型 | 智库出版物
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| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/206402
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推荐引用方式
GB/T 7714 |
Andrew P. Kelly. Regulatory reforms for higher education. 2017.
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