Bush Criticizes Updated Higher Ed Bill

Long overdue for an official congressional reauthorization, the Higher Education Act may face further setbacks after the White House released a statement expressing opposition to specific elements of the new bill last week.

The act—originally passed in 1965 and last renewed a decade ago—is a catch-all educational reform, dealing with everything from student financial aid to campus safety reporting to peer-to-peer file-sharing.

The current renewal bill, called the “College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007,” passed in the House of Representatives late last week and contains new measures, such as one to keep watch on colleges whose tuition increases fall in the top fifth percentile and reward schools that successfully restrain student costs. A similar bill has also passed in the Senate.

The White House’s statement—which notably refrained from threatening a veto—objected to the tuition measure.

The White House also said that the current bill would greatly limit the federal government’s authority to “regulate on accreditation.”

But Suzanne Day, director of federal relations for Harvard in Washington, D.C., said that the current version of the bill fits better with Harvard’s approach to self-evaluation.

“We feel pretty strongly that it’s an institutional right and prerogative” to determine one’s own standards for pedagogical success, she said. “The idea of a national test” of college competency “is not really in tune with that, and we’re content with the way the bill came out.”

According to Day—who said she worked on the previous Higher Education Act as a staff member with Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat—many of the draft bill’s provisions are aimed primarily at state and public institutions. However, Day said that the financial aid elements are of particular relevance to Harvard students, since many rely on Pell grants for tuition.

The act has not been reauthorized since 1998, a delay that Massachusetts Congressman John F. Tierney—a major proponent of the bill through his work on the Education and Labor Committee—attributed to partisan politics.

“There was an effort in some of the previous Republican bills when they were in the majority that would punish schools that did not comply with tuition restrictions,” Tierney said in an interview yesterday. “We’ve resolved our differences and taken out language that was over the top, and we now wield an overwhelming bipartisan majority.”

According to Tierney, the prior version of the law will automatically renew if a new bill isn’t signed by March 31st—a deadline that Tierney said he and his staff hope to meet. The Senate’s version of the bill, S. 1642, passed last July.

—Staff writer Nathan C. Strauss can be reached at strauss@fas.harvard.edu.