Fed Regs Hurt DL

[Herbert Spencer]

They're from the government and they're here to help you.... if "you" happen to be a wealthy bricks & mortar university that doesn't offer DL classes.

Updated 06/07/2011 09:41 AM

Federal regulation could hinder online college courses
By: Chie Saito

Central Texas College has already started to get the ball rolling on complying with upcoming federal mandates that put tighter regulations on schools and universities with online classes.

For CTC student Sharon Blakly, taking classes online is the best option for her busy schedule.

"I work four days on, four days off, 12-hour shifts so it works better in my plan," she said. "I don't have to drive back and forth, saves gas. I can do it at home in my pajamas."

However, federal regulations may soon change the way Blakly, and even out of state students, take CTC courses online.

Under new federal regulations, an open enrollment school like Central Texas College will have to comply with requirements in 48 other states. So, if a student from California wanted to take a CTC course online, the college would have to meet California’s requirements for online learning as well.

"If you offer distance learning courses in any state other than your home state, you must be licensed in that state if it is a requirement," Dana Watson, CTC’S Deputy Chancellor Ed. Programs, said. "With our military student enrollment, it's not necessarily that we have students in all of the 50 states, but some students have that as their permanent address."

Even though the rules don't take effect until 2014, CTC is getting the process started early.

"That's every community college, higher education institution in the United States, trying to fulfill the same requirements so it's quite an undertaking," Watson said.

It’s estimated it can cost schools $1,000 to $10,000 in licensing fees per state. The high cost may potentially force schools like CTC to limit the amount of online courses it offers.

"In some states it might be cost prohibitive in this time of budget constraints to pursue the licensure," Watson said.

These state authorization rules were initially scheduled to take effect this year. However, the deadline was pushed back to 2014 following concerns from higher education associations and accrediting organizations.

All schools are required to start making a good faith effort to comply with the rules now.

[Albert Hidel]

Typical government geniuses at work. They want to screw UoPhx because it makes more money than the socialists think it should. But UoPhx already operates legally in all 50 states. So only the small players get hurt, and the net result is more roadblocks to online education for everyone else.

Crossing state lines gets tougher for colleges, universities
By Anna Mitchell
Posted June 18, 2011 at 4:26 p.m.

CLEMSON — For-profit college students are defaulting at double-digit rates on federally backed education loans. New federal regulations aimed at controlling the industry, though, also affect nonprofit and public institutions that offer online courses and out-of-state internships. At cash-strapped Clemson University, officials estimate they will spend tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours to comply — or risk losing millions of dollars in federal education grants and loans.

Clemson University administrators are pushing to expand online programs, which are cheaper for the cash-strapped university to maintain and also more in demand for working professionals.

But new federal regulations aimed at controlling abuses in the for-profit college industry are costing public institutions like Clemson and private nonprofit schools like Southern Wesleyan thousands, and potentially millions, of dollars to comply.

One large Midwest university system places its estimate at $5.5 million.

To introduce more oversight into the for-profit industry’s education practices, the federal government is now requiring that all higher-education institutions whose students receive federal financial aid be authorized in every state where they are doing business. In general, it means that if a Clemson student is seated outside South Carolina while taking an online class or doing an internship or co-op, the university must have formal permission to be there. Still, “doing business” varies by definition among the 50 states, and is prohibitively expensive in a few.

Should any school fail to comply, its students studying out of state would not be eligible for financial aid. Clemson officials don’t know what percentage of the $90 million in federal aid its students received last year this would apply to.

But they do know it would affect hundreds of students now, and potentially thousands of students in the future. Clemson offered just over 300 classes online this summer, has nine completely online degree programs and 20 certificate programs. About half of Clemson students receive some form of federal financial aid, be it a Pell Grant or a federally backed Stafford Loan.

A July 1 deadline to comply with the federal regulations was recently extended a couple of years, but every college and university must show the federal government a “good faith effort” to comply by late next week.

Paul Lingenfelter is president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers and has been working closely with colleges and universities across the country to comply with the new federal rules. He points out that schools were always supposed to abide by state laws but were ignorant of them or ignored them because of lack of enforcement or because they had so few classes offered to students out of state.

The expansion of online classes is changing the education landscape rapidly, though.

“This regulation has made the inefficiency visible, but it did not create it,” Lingenfelter wrote in an email to the Independent Mail. “It has existed for some time. We need new approaches to quality control and consumer protection to deal with 21st-century educational delivery systems.”

At stake for students is access to programs, or lack thereof, as colleges and universities scale back out-of-state programs to students living in the most aggressively regulated states. These include Alabama, Minnesota and Massachusetts.

Anand Gramopadhye, chairman of Clemson’s department of industrial engineering, said he understands the federal government is trying to maintain high standards among schools receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer money through tuition aid to students.

“You have for-profit institutions trying to sell programs that don’t do what they are supposed to be doing. It’s false advertising,” Gramopadhye said. “If this was the reason to create a damper on those programs, I don’t think this is the best modus operandi.”

ABUSES

Between 2000 and 2009, federal loans and grants for students at for-profit institutes increased 164 percent — much faster than the increase at traditional colleges and universities.

An August 2009 report from the United States Government Accountability Office pointed out that for-profit colleges and institutes have default rates on federal loans that approach 25 percent after four years. Public and private non-profit institutions have default rates below 10 percent in that time frame.

Default rates are much higher at institutions that serve low-income or first-generation college students, the GAO report found.

This accounts for much of the high default rates, but GAO investigators also discovered “significant vulnerabilities” in the U.S. Department of Education’s oversight of federal student aid.

Federal regulators require students to pass basic math and English tests to ensure that they are ready for college before they receive aid. Some for-profit schools were passing out the answers to tests or correcting answers before the tests were graded, the GAO reported.

Anderson’s only for-profit institution, Forrest College, had a 13.9 percent default rate on federal education loans in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available. The rate at Clemson was 1.1 percent, and at Tri-County Tech, where few students receive federal loans, there were no defaults. Anderson University’s rate was 2.3 percent, and Southern Wesleyan in Central was 5.5 percent.

The challenge to assuring a high-quality, authentic postsecondary education in this country, Lingenfelter wrote in a March paper, has always been its regulation by 50 different states in 50 different ways and its sporadic enforcement.

Last October, the U.S. Department of Education announced several new rules — all tied to eligibility for student financial aid — to keep all higher education institutions more accountable. These included clarifying the definition of a credit hour and requiring career schools to publicize the success rates of its students. Then came the rule about schools being authorized to operate in every state where they have students or staff.

“They used the same stick for a lot of things,” said Chuck Knepfle, director of financial aid at Clemson.

A closer reading of each state’s law has revealed that many require authorizations and business fees even if schools don’t have faculty, staff or buildings in a given state, Clemson University Vice Provost Debra Jackson said. Every college and university is being careful about complying, Jackson said, because none wants to lose federal student aid.

“The reason we were told this is being done is to control for-profit institutions,” Jackson said. “The problem with that is the for-profits like University of Phoenix already have a physical presence in all 50 states, and they’ve already done all this. It’s not as big an issue for them.”

COSTS

Clemson’s Jackson said she has been working every day for a month to get authorizations from the 49 other states. She has called, mailed official letters and emailed every agency — each of which has its own rules.

“I have literally contacted every single state,” Jackson said. “Now I’m getting all their responses, and it costs money in most of the states to file.”

Jackson said she hasn’t calculated what this process could cost Clemson, but she’s found it varies widely from state to state.

Offering online classes to students in Minnesota would cost $9,000 up front and then another $500 for every class after that. Alabama, meanwhile, charges $1,500. For students to take Clemson classes in Wyoming or Alaska, the fee is $100, Jackson said, so Clemson will go ahead and pay those. “We also haven’t calculated the cost of hiring someone to monitor this,” Jackson said. “We will have to do this every year. Most of these states, there’s an annual renewal.”

The North Dakota University System analyzed the cost for one institution that serves 615 students in 48 states, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. It found the cost among the 25 states that charge fees would be $159,800 the first year.

Gary Langer of the Minnesota State University System calculated how much his system would have to pay for students in each of the 49 other states to take all the online classes offered at the system’s 32 campuses: $5.5 million.

“We are talking about 360-some programs,” Langer told the Independent Mail, “if we were to get authorization for every program at every school — that’s the application fee and, in some states, it’s a fee by program.”

He said the system is currently deciding which states’ students won’t be allowed to take classes online in Minnesota.

“If I have only three students from Missouri, and they charge $20,000, it’s not worth it,” he said. “Massachusetts is probably the worst. It’s like $28,000. A lot don’t charge anything, which is wonderful.”

At any given time, about a third to half of Clemson students taking part in internships or co-ops are doing them out of state. In some states, Clemson will also need to get authorization because they consider a student doing an internship under a mentor as having a “physical presence” in a state, Jackson said.

She estimated having an intern in Massachusetts could cost about $30,000.

The University of South Carolina, meanwhile, could also run into huge costs because it has expanded its paid recruiter base to other states, which would give the school a physical presence in all. Clemson doesn’t have out-of-state staff recruiters.

“At this point, we have serious questions about the usefulness of some of these regulations, as do many other universities, and we have made those questions known,” said Dr. Lacy Ford, vice provost, University of South Carolina. “We understand that the regulations are currently under review by Congress.

State-level regulators, meanwhile, have endured an avalanche of authorization requests from hundreds of institutions nationwide. Some are ill-prepared.

Renea Eshleman, licensing program manager for the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education, had at last count received 250 requests for authorization — all within a few weeks.

“It’s been a huge burden for us,” Eshleman said. “The state has reduced staff by 40 percent.”

Jackson said the state of Wyoming sent her to a Web page to fill out an application.

“When I called, I found out all the information on the sheet was incorrect,” Jackson said. “Addresses and phone numbers were all wrong. They were like, ‘Oh no, our site is out of date.’”

ONLINE GROWTH

Clemson University has about 100 students in one master’s program it developed together with the Fluor Corp. The “capital projects supply chain” master’s enrolls students from everywhere, which is one of its strengths, student Renee Perry of Texas said.

Perry, who has sons in school and is director of the Fluor Corp.’s strategic sourcing program, said the airplane is her favorite classroom.

“With all I have going on, there’s no way I could sit in on a classroom anywhere,” she said. “With this program, I could listen to lectures at 2 in the morning or at lunch. I could catch 30 minutes and finish the rest later.”

Bryan Cassidy is an expediter for Houston-based S&B Engineers and Constructors Limited. He said the program caters perfectly to working professionals.

“I know for a fact that I could not have given up work for two-plus years to get a master’s degree,” he wrote in an email to the Independent Mail. “With the current state of the economy, there may not have been any positions available once I completed the degree.”

Barry Ray with Anderson University said his school offers 127 courses online and will be selective about which states to secure authorization. This means students from a state like California may find themselves unable to take online courses at Anderson University.

“We are not in the same position as some schools with vast national and international markets they are very active in,” Ray said.

At Southern Wesleyan, Provost Keith Iddings said his school has decided it can’t afford to get state authorization in Alabama.

“For the three students we have from there, we will tell them they can’t get financial aid for online courses,” he said. “It’s actually going to hurt students rather than help them. They will have fewer options.”

Michele Canchola, a family readiness coordinator for an Anderson-based National Guard unit, said online courses are also ideal for members of the military and their families. Members of the military know, she said, that expanding their education is crucial for advancement in civilian and military careers. But enrolling full time at a brick-and-mortar institution, she said, isn’t a realistic option for someone who could be deployed at any time or for a spouse left home with a household and children to manage alone.

Clemson’s Gramopadhye said the online education market hasn’t been fully realized.

“The future and the way the economy is, folks who have jobs, if they want to retrofit themselves and get new skill set, you don’t expect them to give up their job and come to school,” he said. “This allows them to do both.”

[Ben Johnson]

Nationsuniversity already says screw the crap and borrow an out of state address.

http://www.nationsu.net/

Due to special requirements imposed by state governments, students may not enroll if they register with a physical address in Nevada or Wyoming.

We should get a constitution so the Godless bastards in Nevada and Wyoming permit the Churches of Christ to offer online religious education.