Issue Briefs

About

Regulation and oversight in higher education is important to ensuring accountability for federal dollars.  In many cases, however, these requirements do not relate to good stewardship but are imposed solely by virtue of the fact that federal student aid assistance is provided. As a result, complying with the ever-growing array of federal requirements has become extremely costly and time-consuming for colleges and universities and has diverted resources away from serving students.

The difficulty is that, regardless of how well intentioned, these requirements continue to accumulate with no corresponding attempt to review existing rules or to eliminate unnecessary, ineffectual, or duplicative requirements. Congress should decide what is critical to federal oversight, taxpayers, and higher education consumers and then limit reporting and related regulatory requirements to those areas.

Moreover, in recent years, regulations have increasingly become the subject of partisan battles, with each administration seeking to undo the opposing party’s efforts, making it more difficult to reduce or eliminate regulations that have become outdated or unnecessary.

History

Former Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) was interested throughout his career in eliminating many of the outdated or inapplicable regulations impacting institutions of higher education – a process that he deemed “weeding the garden.” To help guide this deregulation effort, a bipartisan group of senators appointed 16 higher education leaders to create the Task Force on the Federal Regulation of Higher Education, which included seven NAICU members.

The Task Force published a final report in 2015, focusing on regulatory requirements in the areas of student financial aid, campus security, federal Financial Responsibility Standards, data collection, disclosures, and accreditation. The report also identified a number of specific requirements that are particularly problematic for institutions.

Unfortunately, the Task Force appears to have been the high-water mark of federal deregulatory efforts. Although there has been significant interest over the years in implementing some of the recommendations of the Task Force, particularly among Republicans in Congress, few, if any, of the proposals have been enacted, and opportunities for change have dwindled as higher education has become a prime target for bipartisan attacks over costs and accountability. As a result, the regulatory burden on institutions of higher education has continued to grow. 

Recent Developments

During his first term, President Trump highlighted the need to reduce unnecessary federal compliance costs imposed on colleges and universities, issuing two executive orders and creating a Regulatory Reform Task Force to review agency regulations and guidance and to recommend which ones to repeal, modify, or retain. The Administration also took efforts to rescind or modify regulations and guidance in a number of areas such as teacher preparation, gainful employment, and borrower defense to repayment, although some of the changes may have been driven more by an effort to alter policy than ease regulatory burden.

In contrast, the Biden Administration's regulatory agenda focused on rewriting regulations on many issues of these same topics, as well as establishing arduous new regulations in new areas, such as financial value transparency and related accountability rules.

Meanwhile, the second Trump Administration has been significantly less interested in deregulation than the first, focusing instead on dramatically reshaping higher education by issuing numerous new regulations and guidance documents and aggressively pursuing its policy priorities on accountability, civil rights, accreditation, and more.