[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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