The House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development held a hearing last week to look into the cost and value of higher education, ostensibly focused on how a market-based approach to accountability may lower tuition prices, eliminate low-value degree programs, and reduce student debt.

Chairman Burgess Owens (R-UT) framed the hearing as a referendum on the state of higher education, and pinned the blame for what he perceives as the failures of higher education on “outdated measures of quality, coupled with virtually zero transparency of value.” This tracks closely to how the Republican party is framing the broader Higher Education Act reauthorization conversation: that colleges should be held accountable for tuition price increases and low-value programs.

For the Democrats, Ranking Member Frederica Wilson (D-FL) told the committee that a college degree is “the surest path to the American Dream... especially true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.” She also stressed the need for greater accountability for bad actors and low-quality programs, highlighting the Department of Education’s latest iteration of the Gainful Employment (GE) rule proposed earlier this year to save taxpayer dollars from going to abusive for-profit institutions.

Both sides of the aisle supported stronger accountability measures for higher education, with each party and panel witness agreeing that meaningful consequences for poor-performing programs is a must.

There was also widespread support for expanding the Pell Grant to short-term programs, but Republicans and Democrats disagreed on the underlying case for which programs should be included. Republicans were largely against setting a bar against program inclusion, and Democrats wanted to ensure that programs accessing Pell have data to show that they are effective.

Risk-sharing was also raised several times during the hearing, with the Republicans and their witnesses pushing to have institutions cosign student loans, while Democrats reiterated their support for strong GE enforcement. The proposed Financial Value Transparency “name-and-shame" list was not a significant topic of discussion, though Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) pushed back against just using wage data to measure educational quality.

Of particular interest to NAICU members, the University of Dayton (comments) and Lenoir-Rhyne University (comments) submitted comments for the record on their commitment to college cost transparency.