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Progress Update
The Department pursued several rulemaking activities during FY 2015 on higher education topics, including the use of prepaid debit cards at IHEs; teacher preparation programs; and implementation of WIOA, which reforms adult education training and services, including in the areas of English language acquisition and vocational rehabilitation for individuals with disabilities. Most significantly, the Department implemented the Gainful Employment regulations, which took effect July 1, 2015, and began collecting data from institutions. The regulations foster program quality through transparency and accountability. Institutions will be required to notify students about completion rates as well as debt and earnings outcomes for certain types of occupational-oriented programs; programs that do not meet established standards risk losing eligibility for federal student aid funds. The Department also implemented its state authorization regulations on July 1 and reminded institutions and states of dual requirements that 1) IHEs must be authorized to operate in a given state by the appropriate state agency, and 2) that agency must have a process for handling student complaints.
The Department continues to encourage the higher education community to focus on innovative, transparent, and validated approaches to student learning. Through the Experimental Sites initiative, the Department announced experiments in the areas of competency-based learning, Federal Work Study, and prior learning assessments. The results of these experiments will guide future policy decisions. The Department and the White House convened a group of 50 leading higher education experts for a discussion of innovation in higher education. Participants spent the day considering opportunities for innovation on which the federal government and others could take action expediently, and were led through a design-thinking workshop about how online learning tools can catalyze improvements in postsecondary education.
The Department awarded 18 First in the World grants totaling $60 million, with nine of the winning applications awarded to minority-serving institutions. The program focuses on high-need students and promotes evidence-based strategies and practices for college access and completion. Funded projects include a partnership of community colleges to implement proactive and individualized student support services, informed by an early alert and advising system based in predictive analytics; incorporating new teaching and learning strategies into the curriculum and student experience at an Historically Black College; and creating seamless transfer of lower-division general education requirements across participating institutions based on students’ demonstration of learning outcomes regardless of courses or credits completed. The Department, through a contractor, will provide technical assistance to assist all grantees in conducting rigorous project evaluations. Those projects showing evidence of success will serve as models for possible dissemination or could be eligible for future validation and scale-up grants.
The Department awarded 40 grants totaling $17.5 million in the Strengthening Institutions Program (SIP).[1] This program helps postsecondary schools expand their capacity to serve low-income students by providing funds to improve and strengthen academic quality, institutional management, and fiscal stability, as well as build a framework to help students complete college. For the FY 2015 competition, the Department included a competitive preference priority supporting programs, practices, or strategies that are based on rigorous evidence.
The Department created an interagency task force on for-profit schools, including the Departments of Education, Defense, Justice, Labor, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The task force established a working group to focus on enforcement-related issues.
The Department collaborated with the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Corporation for National and Community Service, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services to develop Performance Partnership Pilots (P3) for Disconnected Youth. Nine pilots were announced in October 2015 that will test the hypothesis that additional flexibility for states, localities, and tribes, in the form of blending funds and obtaining waivers of certain programmatic requirements, can help overcome some of the significant hurdles that states, localities, and tribes may face in providing intensive, comprehensive, and sustained service pathways and improving outcomes for disconnected youth. Proposed priorities, requirements, definitions, and selection criteria for a second competition are under development (subsequently published in October as well).
In collaboration with the National Economic Council, the Department of Labor, and the Aspen Institute, the Department held an UpSkill Summit at the White House on April 24, 2015. One hundred employers made commitments to help millions of frontline workers develop their skills, training and credentials. The Department secured similar commitments from national and international labor unions and labor-management collaborations.
As part of the President’s commitment to double the number of apprenticeships in the country, the Department collaborated with the Department of Labor and the Office of the Vice President to secure over 200 commitments from community colleges and their Registered Apprenticeship partners to grant college credits and degrees to individuals who hold apprenticeship program completion certificates.
The Department surpassed its FY 2015 target for reducing the number of low-performing institutions—i.e., those with high student loan cohort default rates and below average completion rates. However, the Department proposes to replace this metric in FY 2016 with other metrics that take advantage of better data available through the expanded College Scorecard.
[1] FY 2015 awards listed at http://www2.ed.gov/programs/iduestitle3a/awards.html.
