A congressional hearing here Wednesday was the latest illustration of what has, in recent years, become a bedrock reality of the politics of higher education at the federal level: lawmakers across the political spectrum want to hold colleges more accountable for student outcomes.
Democrats and Republicans on the Senate education committee were in agreement that the government’s existing accountability metrics, like default rates, are inadequate. And nearly all backed the concept of risk sharing -- the idea that individual colleges need to have a greater financial stake in what happens to the federal loans that students use to attend their institutions.
For all the bipartisan rhetoric about risk sharing, though, Wednesday’s hearing also showed that hammering out the details of a new accountability regime won’t be easy.
Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the Republican who chairs the committee, said that he was “seriously considering” including some type of new risk-sharing program in his rewrite of the Higher Education Act.
Alexander first floated the idea in a series of policy papers he released earlier this year. One approach he is eyeing would require colleges to pay back to the government some share of the defaulted loans of its former students.
Several Democratic Senators -- Rhode Island's Jack Reed, Illinois's Dick Durbin and Massachusetts's Elizabeth Warren -- have also introduced a risk-sharing proposal along those lines. Their plan, which they first introduced in 2013, would require colleges to repay a share, based on a sliding scale, of the defaulted debt of their graduates.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/05/21/bipartisan-agreement-risk-sharing-concept-only