Dear Colleagues,

From our spring Board and Committee meetings in Dallas last week I travelled to San Diego to participate in the 2024 ASU+GSV Summit and spoke on a panel about the path forward for higher education during the course of the next decade. To be successful on that path forward will require a continued emphasis on access, affordability, and accountability while ensuring that our efforts are focused on a student-centered approach. It was a pleasure to represent our sector during this conference.

In other news, I know that we are all working hard on navigating the FAFSA debacle while also trying to secure further delays in the implementation of the Financial Value Transparency and Gainful Employment regulatory package. I’m proud of the movement we’ve seen thus far, though more needs to be done. It has also been great to see the support that the membership is securing from Members of Congress to push the Department of Education to further delay this implementation. Earlier this week, for example, Oregon Rep. Andrea Salinas sent a letter to Secretary Cardona requesting a full year delay, to July 1, 2025, for implementation. We must keep the pressure on both Congress and the Department, however.

Finally, as I write this on Thursday afternoon, we are awaiting the imminent release of the Department of Education’s new Title IX rule and the Department of Labor’s new overtime rule. We expect Title IX to be lengthy and take some time to digest and analyze. As for overtime, we are still expecting the threshold for an employee to be considered exempt from overtime pay to increase from the current level of $35,568 to closer to $60,000. We will have more details on both once they are released and analyzed.

Soundbites

• As announced last week, the Department of Education has made its FAFSA corrections process widely available to students.  The process will provide millions of students who made mistakes or left out required information during their initial FAFSA submission the opportunity to get their FAFSA corrected and out to schools. The announcement also provided information on how schools can determine which error issues impacted the ISIRs on the new error sheets the Department recently sent to schools.

• The Department of Education is expected to release final Title IX regulations as early as today after the Office of Management and Budget completed the final stage of regulatory review last week. While both the details of the final package and the implementation timeline are unknown, the rules will not address athletic participation by transgender students because that portion of the regulations are still under review by the Department. Revising the Title IX regulations has been a top priority of the Biden Administration, which published proposed rules nearly two years ago. NAICU will conduct a thorough analysis of the new regulations once they are released.

• The House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing examining Columbia University’s response to antisemitism on campus. The hours-long hearing revealed bipartisan concern about the rise of antisemitism on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s invasion of Israel and featured testimony from Columbia University President Minouche Shafik and other Columbia faculty and board members, who outlined the steps the university is taking to address the issue.

• As a co-leader of the Student Aid Alliance, NAICU signed the FY 2025 funding request letter to House and Senate appropriators highlighting the need to work toward doubling the Pell Grant maximum award to $13,000 while providing increased funding for the other student aid programs that reflects inflation and increases the purchasing power for low-income students.

• The Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague letter regarding new limitations on the length of Gainful Employment (GE) programs from new Certification Procedures regulations issued last year. The letter also addresses issues around new GE placement and completion rate requirements from the same regulations. 

Today’s Washington Update reports on the latest effort from the Biden Administration on student debt relief, which will include an additional $7.4 billion in relief. 

Regards

Barbara

Barbara K. Mistick, D.B.A.
President, NAICU