WASHINGTON — Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the chair of the Senate education committee, said at a committee hearing Wednesday federal aid and higher education policies should better encourage students to make progress toward graduating on time.
“Few can afford to be stuck with debt and no degree, but this is what’s happening to far too many college students,” Alexander said. “We need to find a way to encourage our over 6,000 higher-education institutions to prioritize and encourage student success without throwing a big, wet blanket of a federal mandate that smothers universities — a mandate that might work at Austin Peay but might not work at the University of Maryland, that might be good at Yeshiva but not at Harvard.”
Alexander pointed to a statistic by the National Student Clearinghouse that says only 55 percent of students in federal aid programs complete a degree or certificate within six years, and that percentage is lower for low-income students.
He also cited the Department of Education, which says borrowers are more likely to default on their federal student loans if they did not graduate.
“Federal policy has emphasized access rather than completion,” Alexander said.
His proposal, in collaboration with Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), to put a focus back on completion aims to vastly simply the FAFSA from 108 questions to two questions, because he said the lengthy application discourages about 2 million students from applying or reapplying.
Other areas of federal aid he said needed extra scrutiny are credit requirements and degree progress. He said federal and institutional requirements to remain eligible are too broad and may not keep students on track to graduate on time. Additionally, federal aid can be used on courses that exceed degree requirements, for example, Pell grant recipients can use their grants to take 90 credits for a 60-credit associate degree.
Aside from federal aid policies, an inadequate high school education also plays a role in completion rates, Alexander said, because remedial courses are one of the “biggest barriers to timely graduation.”
He credited Austin Peay State University as a good example of how universities can navigate this barrier. Austin Peay redesigned its remedial program so that now students who need remedial education enroll in courses for credit but supplement them with additional workshops, which has raised the number of remedial math students who have completed a college level math class from 10 percent to 70 percent.