[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 55 (Thursday, April 16, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2240-S2241]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    HIGHER EDUCATION REAUTHORIZATION

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed 
in the Record a copy of my remarks to the American Council on 
Education.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                    Higher Education Reauthorization

       I am here today to read you a letter and ask for your help. 
     I'm going to be very specific. First, I want to thank 
     Chancellors Kirwan and Zeppos for the work they've done with 
     others at the request of four United States senators: two 
     Democrats and two Republicans, Senator Mikulski and Senator 
     Bennett on the Democratic side and Senator Burr and myself on 
     the Republican side.
       We asked them to not give us a sermon but to give us 
     specific recommendations for exactly what to do about the 
     problem of overregulation of higher education, and they've 
     done that. The English professors on your campuses would be 
     very pleased with it because it's actually recommended in 
     plain English with mostly declarative sentences. It's an 
     unusual report. It's very well done. And the way things work 
     in Washington, it reminds me a lot of the report called 
     ``Rise Above Gathering Storm'' that the National Academy of 
     Sciences sponsored about ten years ago, and Norm Augustine 
     headed it. We basically said, ``Just give us ten specific 
     things to do, and if you do, we'll probably do most of 
     them.'' They gave us 20 recommendations, and we've done most 
     of them.
       So this is really a blueprint or an agenda for the United 
     States Congress and the United States Secretary of Education 
     to act on the problem. I want to thank Molly Broad for her 
     work at ACE on this and for organizing it and Terry Hartle 
     and Anne Hickey, who are staff members there. There's 
     Christina West at Vanderbilt University, who worked hard on 
     the report. At the University System of Maryland, there's PJ 
     Hogan, and Andrew LaCasse on our staff in the Senate. They 
     did a terrific job.
       Now, what I'm supposed to do here is take 10 or 12 minutes 
     and then sit down and see what questions or suggestions you 
     have with the chancellors. So, I thought the best way to do 
     that was to read you a letter and come close to telling you a 
     story. One of my friends was the late Alex Haley, the author 
     of Roots. After I made a speech one time, he came up after 
     and said, ``May I make a suggestion?'' I said, ``Well of 
     course.'' He said, ``If before you make a speech, you say, 
     `Instead of making a speech let me tell you story,' people 
     may actually listen to what you have to say.'' So, let me 
     begin with a short story.
       I got this over the weekend from someone I don't know. It's 
     from a president from a University in Missouri, handwritten, 
     and says, among other things, ``I've been in higher education 
     administration for over 40 years, the last 20 as a university 
     president, and I've never experienced the amount of 
     regulatory pressure that our institution currently faces.''
       I hear that in lots of different ways, and this report is 
     an expression of what to do about that. For example, this 
     isn't just a sermon, as I mentioned. There are 59 specific 
     suggestions about what to do. In testimony before our 
     committee, almost everyone who testified said that requiring 
     students to fill out the FAFSA form in their senior year and 
     providing tax information before they file their taxes makes 
     no sense. It would make a lot more sense to do it the year 
     before. Almost everybody said that we should do that.
       So, in this report are 59 recommendations, and what I want 
     to ask you to do is organize yourselves in your own state and 
     make an appointment with your member of the United States 
     Congress. And get six or seven members of the university and 
     sit down and talk about this report, and say, ``Now we worked 
     two years on this. This is serious business. It costs a lot 
     of money. It discourages a lot of students from coming to our 
     colleges, and we'd like for you to support the legislation 
     Senator Alexander and Senator Mikulski and Senator Burr and 
     Senator Bennett are introducing in order to implement the 
     report.'' You might add Senator Murray of Washington who is 
     the ranking Democrat on the committee as she will be deeply 
     involved in this as well.
       Sometimes university presidents come to Washington to meet 
     with members of Congress. That's the biggest waste of time I 
     can think of. We're all running around here with 15-minute 
     schedules trying to keep up with things and have many more 
     requests for appointments than we have time to see or pay 
     attention to. But almost every single senator who is on the 
     committee that is going to deal with this is home every 
     weekend, and the senator from Tennessee, with all due 
     respect, doesn't really want to see the president of the 
     University of Maryland. He would like to see the president of 
     the University of Tennessee or of Vanderbilt or of Milligan 
     College or Maryville College or Rhodes College. If five or 
     six or eight of those presidents say, ``Senator Alexander, 
     may we have a 30-minute appointment with you while you're 
     home next month?'', I'll do it in a minute. So will every 
     other senator. And you have the credibility to go to that 
     member of Congress and say, ``Will you please vote for this? 
     Will you cosponsor the legislation? Will you support it? Will 
     you encourage the president to sign it?'' Odds are, if you do 
     that they will. It's about that simple.
       There are a lot of things we work on up here about which we 
     have big partisan differences. There is no reason to have any 
     big partisan differences over this. There are a few things in 
     it that get haggles up on the left and the right, but most 
     things aren't like that at all. There is just the 
     accumulation of eight reauthorizations of the Higher 
     Education Act beginning in 1965, and you know exactly what 
     happens. A well-meaning group of senators, congressmen, 
     education secretaries, regulators come up with an idea and 
     said, ``Let's do this, or here's a good idea let's make 
     everybody do that.'' And they just keep doing that until 
     pretty soon you get a stack of regulations that's twice as 
     tall as I am. You're looking at the Higher Education Act, and 
     that's how tall it actually is. Nobody's weeded the garden. 
     Well, this is an effort to weed the garden. So, I read a 
     letter. I've asked for your help, and your help is very 
     specific.
       Will you please make an appointment in your home state, 
     starting with the 22 members of the Senate Health, Education, 
     Labor and Pensions Committee and say to us, ``We hope you'll 
     vote for and support that.''
       Now, you'll all recognize this. This is what 20 million 
     parents fill out every single year. And lots of colleges have 
     said, ``Well we like this information.'' You have to think 
     about how much you like it. Does it really work? Asking 20 
     million families to fill out 108 questions like this every 
     year just to get a grant or loan to go to college? A 
     testimony before our committee said we could get it down to 
     two questions: what's your family income, and what's the size 
     of your family? Maybe it's two, maybe it's four, maybe it's 
     10, maybe it's 12. President Obama in his budget advocated 
     for removing about thirty of those questions, so that takes 
     it down from 108 to about 78.
       What's the importance of that? The importance of it is 
     pretty obvious. The importance of it is that it saves money, 
     it saves time, and the president of the community college in 
     Memphis, Southwest Tennessee Community College, told me he 
     thinks he loses 1,500 students every semester because of the 
     complexity of the form that impair students that would like 
     to go to college.
       The second story you'd like to know is Chancellor Zeppos's 
     story about how much it costs at Vanderbilt every year to 
     comply with federal regulations on higher education: $150 
     million for one institution, $11,000 or $12,000 for everyone 
     to add onto their tuition. That's just ridiculous. That's 
     absolutely absurd.
       Now, another fact is that the National Academy of Sciences 
     says, and they've done two reports to verify this, that 
     investigators of federally-sponsored research at colleges and 
     universities spend 42 percent of their time on administrative 
     matters. Now we spend $30 billion, we taxpayers at colleges 
     and universities on research. How much of that money is spent 
     on administrative? Well, Chancellor Zeppos said that at 
     Vanderbilt--and I think I've got my figures right--that about 
     $136 million of the $146 was allocated for research. So, the 
     way I figured it, about 25 percent of all the research money 
     he gets at Vanderbilt, which is probably $500 million, goes 
     to administrative tasks. Forty-two percent of the time we're 
     researching. If we can move from 42 to 35 to 33 to 30, we 
     could save $1 billion or $2 billion and take the dollars to 
     fund hundreds, maybe thousands, of multi-year research 
     grants, which we hear so much about declining.
       And then the fact that we've been trying to reduce these 
     for a long time. One of my first acts as a senator was to 
     pass legislation requiring the U.S. Department of Education 
     to make a calendar of all of the things that you are supposed 
     to comply with if you are in one of the 6000-plus colleges 
     and universities in America. They have had seven years, and 
     they haven't been able to do it. Well, if they can't do that, 
     how can a small Catholic college in Wisconsin hire somebody 
     to figure it out? And according to this report, there is a 
     new guidance or regulation coming out on average every 
     workday in the U.S. Department of Education. So, you just 
     have that combination of 108-question FAFSA; $150 million at 
     one university to comply; the National Academy saying 42 
     percent of time is spent by investigators is spent on 
     administration; and the department itself unable to make a 
     list of all of the rules that it expects you to comply with--
     that's a pretty good case to make for the people you talk to.
       And then I would suggest that a delegation--and again I 
     have discussed this with the chancellors--go see Arne Duncan 
     at the U.S. Department of Education. I meant this isn't all 
     his fault; it's all of our faults among

[[Page S2241]]

     all of us who have been Secretary of Education, all of us who 
     have been in the Congress since 1965. We haven't done our 
     job, and of the 59 recommendations, probably a dozen are 
     recommendations that the U.S. Secretary of Education could do 
     himself. They could be done by an administrator. So, go to 
     Secretary Duncan and say, ``Look, we'd like to make a hero 
     out of you. We're here to say, we've identified the 12 areas 
     that you can change that would make a big difference in 
     increasing innovation and reducing cost of colleges all 
     across America.'' And I've talked with him about that, and I 
     think he'd be willing to hear about that.
       We'll be reauthorizing the Higher Education Act later this 
     year after we get through fixing ``No Child Left Behind,'' 
     which is the first order of business. And the first thing we 
     want to do is make it easier for students to go to college. 
     That's the ``FAST Act,'' aimed at simplifying the student aid 
     form. That includes saying that you can apply your junior 
     year of high school, so you can know what your award will be 
     before you are admitted to college. And, you will know what 
     your tax information is before you have to turn in your form.
       We want to simplify the number of grants and loans. We want 
     to make it possible for there to be year-round Pell for your 
     students to be able to follow their own rate and use their 
     Pell grants and student aid progressively at their own rate 
     in college. We'd like to discourage over-borrowing by 
     changing some rules that exist, permit you to do more 
     counseling of students, change the rule that allows a part-
     time student to borrow a full-time amount of money. We'd like 
     to simplify the repayment plans. Now, all those things don't 
     have much to do with being a Republican or a Democrat. They 
     have a lot to do with an important system.
       We'd like to take as many of these fifty-nine 
     recommendations and put them in a bill and pass them as we 
     can. A lot of that will depend upon your business at home to 
     the men and women who run the universities in your state. We 
     want to take a look at the accreditation and make sure it's 
     focused on the right thing. As a former university president, 
     I didn't like a lot about accreditation. The only thing I 
     would like less would be having the U.S. Department of 
     Education take the place of the accreditor. So, let's work 
     together and fix the accreditation system and have focus on 
     academic quality instead of all that random other stuff that 
     accreditors often get themselves involved in.
       We want to make it harder to over-borrow. I mentioned a 
     couple of ideas about this. There are a few more in this 
     report. Finally, we want to do our best to make sure that the 
     consumer information that you're asked for really is needed 
     and is presented in a useful way to students. Typically, it's 
     just a big pile of stuff that has the disadvantage of by the 
     time you go all the way through you haven't learned anything. 
     It's like a mortgage application or a car loan. You just sign 
     at the bottom and have no clue about what you just signed. We 
     need simpler, plain English, clear sentences--pieces of 
     information that are valuable to students and that are 
     valuable to parents, and that we can weed our way through the 
     system more confidently.
       So, that's what we're trying to do, and we need your help. 
     One thing that I would say to you is that this is a train 
     that is likely to move down track in out of the station by 
     the end of year. Why do I say that? Well, because it has 
     bipartisan support in a town that's not noted for that. This 
     report has been active interest of four senators who will a 
     lot more. The FAST Act, as we call it, which will simplify 
     student aid has the support of six: Senator Booker and 
     Senator King and Senator Burr and Senator Isakson and me, 
     equally divided by party. Senator Murray and I, she's from 
     Washington state, will work together to reauthorize it. I've 
     talked to the president about it. He did a very good job of 
     working with us on some forms on student loans two years ago. 
     There's no reason he can't work with us in that way and this 
     year finish the job.
       So, I hope you'll keep in mind the letter that I read. I 
     suspect that you have made the same feelings, and I am here 
     to thank you for the tremendous work that ACE and the 
     chancellors and their team and staff did on the report. It's 
     been one of the most consequential reports made to the 
     Congress during this year. Will you please make an 
     appointment in the next thirty days in your home state, first 
     with the members of the Senate education committee? Bring 
     along a few colleagues and say, ``We spent a lot of time on 
     this. This is wasting a lot of money. This is discouraging a 
     lot of students. This is taking a lot of time. Will you 
     please support this bipartisan effort to bring some common 
     sense to the jungle of red tape that is the current federal 
     regulation of higher education?'' Thank you.

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