Legislative Notes for the week of March 20 - March 24, 2006

Senate Passes Bonding Bill

The bonding bill moved quickly through the Senate this week. On Tuesday, the Senate Higher Education Budget Division endorsed the entire Minnesota State Colleges and Universities bonding request to the Capital Investment Committee. That evening, the Senate Capital Investment committee approved a $990 million bill, SF3475 (Sen. Keith Langseth, DFL-Glyndon), with bipartisan support and sent it to Senate Finance to be heard Wednesday morning. Senate Finance passed the bill and it went to the floor for a vote by the full Senate on Thursday. The Senate passed the bill on a vote of 56 - 9. Included in the final bill is $167.7 million for the system. (The $167.7 million is actually $224.4 million when debt service is factored in.) The Senate approved $55 million in HEAPR (half of the system’s request) and fully funded all the projects in the request with one exception. The systemwide property acquisition request was partially funded, reduced from $11.4 million to $9.3 million.

View SF3475

View tracking sheet

Chair of the House Capital Investment Committee, Dan Dorman, R-Albert Lea, said he is hoping the House will pass the bonding bill off the floor the second week of April.

University of Minnesota at Rochester

The Rochester Higher Education Development Committee recommended that the University of Minnesota expand its existing work in Rochester. The Senate Higher Education Budget Division adopted language this week from SF3317, the governor’s supplemental bill, on a University of Minnesota presence in Rochester. Language in the bill states that the Legislature’s intent is to develop new and strengthen existing partnerships with higher education institutions in Rochester and the region in which the state already has a significant investment. The committee adopted the language to be incorporated into the omnibus bill. An appropriation for the University of Minnesota has not yet been acted on in the Senate Higher Education Budget Division. The House Higher Education Finance Division intends to hear the bill on Wednesday of next week.

View the full Rochester Higher Education Development Committee report

View SF3317

Higher Education provisions are in Article 3 of the bill.

First Bill Deadline Fast Approaching

The first bill deadline agreed upon by both the House and Senate is on Tuesday, March 28. This means that committees are to act favorably on bills in the house of origin. There was a flurry of activity this week with lawmakers trying to get their bills heard. We also will see lengthy agendas early next week. Things are moving quickly at the Capitol with the next two deadlines following close behind. Committees are to pass their omnibus bills, if any, by Tuesday, April 11.

New House Majority Leader John Boehner Unveils Agenda

A theme-based agenda was announced by Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) in an effort to efficiently move through the remaining congressional calendar. Final specifics will be laid out in a document to be ready in the next several weeks. The draft calendar follows the following weekly themes:

March 27 Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

April 3 Budget resolution, pension reform, lobbying, ethics and 527 reform

April 23 Focus on "Protecting Our Homeland and Troops" with a ports security bill and the intelligence reauthorization measure

May 1 Open

May 8 Continues the security theme and Defense authorization

May 15 Appropriations (Agriculture and Interior) and eminent domain

May 22 "Katrina Lessons Learned" and Homeland Security appropriations

June 5 "Spring Cleaning Week" with tax extenders, the line-item veto and budget reform on tap.

June 12 “Innovation” to include votes on data protection, Internet gaming and Internet taxation

June 14 Flag Day - the House will vote on a flag-burning constitutional amendment

June 18 "Pro-consumer" health care bills, including health savings accounts and the Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bills

June 25 Energy package (yet-to-be developed)

In addition, Boehner identified four promises to guide Republicans through November; to keep America prosperous; to ensure affordable and accessible health care; to spend their tax dollars wisely; and to strengthen national security and border security.

Higher Education Act Reauthorization

Next week, the House is scheduled to consider the College Access & Opportunity Act (H.R. 609). In a “Dear Colleague” letter, the majority, including Congressman John Kline (R- District 2) urged members to support the bill. As a reminder, the House bill includes provisions as noted below.

Strengthening Pell Grants, student aid, access, and minority serving schools by:

Allowing Pell Grants to apply to year-round education students in order to promote progress towards completion of their education;
Eliminating the incentive for colleges to raise tuition costs by retracting the Pell Grant “tuition sensitivity” clause.
Allowing working students to earn more money without receiving a penalty from student aid; and
Increasing funding to TRIO and GEAR UP, as well as establish additional program performance measures.

Eliminating barriers for non-traditional students by:

Repealing the 90/10 rule. The 90/10 rule requires proprietary schools to demonstrate that 10 percent of their funding is from a different source than student aid in an effort to prevent fraud and abuse in student aid programs. For-profit institutions have sought to eliminate the rule, which they say restricts their ability to admit large numbers of low-income students in urban areas.
Updating definitions within HEA to reflect that all institutions of higher education are defined as one, unlike the previous definitions which had a tiered definition; changing this definition would allow for-profit institutions to seek funds from Higher Education Act program sources, which have been stagnant for years, would dilute the goals of the programs across the country.
Repealing the “50 percent rule.” Currently, eligibility for Federal student financial aid is limited to institutions that offer at least 50 percent of their courses on-campus and enroll at least 50 percent of their students in such courses (the 50:50 rule).

Providing “sunshine” and transparency to college costs and accreditation to students and parents by:

Providing more information to consumers regarding what they are getting for their money in an easy to use format. These data packages will be called “College Consumer Profiles”;
Federally highlighting schools that authorize a significant tuition increase. These schools will be required to provide documentation as to the cause of these increases; and
Making the accreditation process more open while mandating that accrediting agencies publicly display their information. The bill approved by the committee includes the “CHEA Transfer Principle” – that institutions are not to refuse to consider transfer requests based solely on the accredited status of an institution as long as the accreditor is recognized by the Secretary of Education. Institutional transfer policies are to be publicly available.

The Senate version of the bill (S 1614) does not contain some of the proposals included in the House bill and is much more favorable to public higher education. The Senate is expected to bring up the measure under unanimous consent soon. House and Senate negotiators eventually will have to work out differences between the bills.

The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) has compiled side-by-side Comparisons of House and Senate Bills to current law. They have also compiled a more recent set of side-by-side charts showing the exact legislative language and a short description of the changes to the Higher Education Act made by Congress with the Reconciliation bill that was signed into law by President Bush on February 9, 2006.

View charts

The references for and full text of H.R. 609 and the companion Senate bill S. 1614 can be found at http://thomas.loc.gov/

New Bill on Due Process in Accreditation

H.R. 4795 was introduced last month to amend Higher Education Act provisions related to accreditation. The bill focuses on due process, accreditation standards related to institutional governance and state accreditors. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation has prepared a chart to compare current law to H.R. 4795, H.R. 609 and S. 1614.

View chart