Friday Follow Up

Negreg for institutional accountability, Garrison Keillor visits higher education, and some new panels and interviews

Author

Phil Hill
July 25, 2025

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Morgan and I have finished the summer LMS conferencepalooza, and we plan to release conference reports for Anthology, D2L, and Instructure next week. Expect some food and whiskey photos as well.

A Rare Gaggle of LMS Vendors

We now have the full video recordings from the University of Leeds Online Learning Summit. For the full event, you can go to the Leeds Mediasite pages for Day 1 and Day 2. In particular, this is the plenary talk by Neil Mosley and Morgan giving an overview of the state of on line learning in the UK and US.

In the vein of LMS coverage, here is the direct video of the panel that included high-level representatives from the four major vendors: Melissa Loble from Instructure, Scott Anderberg from Moodle, Cristi Ford from D2L, and Nico Matthijs from Anthology. We talked about vendor roles in academic transformation, how EdTech will play in a Big Tech-dominated AI era, and other topics. I believe this is the first time since 2019 that we’ve had this level of LMS vendors on one panel, and it is worth watching.

OK, one other media share. Morgan was on the TOPcast with Tom Cavanagh and Kelvin Thompson based on her recent presentation at the University of Central Florida. This interview included a discussion that we rarely hear - when will the growth of online education slow or stop?

Negotiated Rulemaking on Flawed “Do No Harm” Accountability

I have written quite a bit on the Senate’s version of institutional and program accountability that was passed into law with the One Big Beautiful Bill. In particular, I noted the fundamental flaw behind the selected metrics for the earnings test per program.

Let’s go back to the hypothetical Julia in McAllen. She is disadvantaged by being in a program that is predominantly female and in a poor part of Texas. The Earnings Threshold is an aggregation across all of Texas (including Dallas, Austin, and many other higher-income areas) and combining male and female. Her program will likely fail, and Julia will have no access to federal financial aid. All due to a flawed metric.

With the Senate accountability section of the bill, all undergraduate degree programs are about to face this same problem.

Given the current anti-DEI mood in the country, I should note that I am not arguing that different demographic groups must have similar outcomes. I am arguing, however, that setting policy based on a fundamentally flawed metric will result in a lot of unintended harm.

Well, Senate and Senate staffers. If one goal was to show nonprofit institutions how difficult it is to manage poorly-designed metrics, and if another goal was to give me more data analysis to work on to find the unintended harms, then job well done. I fully acknowledge that there will be some positive benefits by discouraging majors that should not be enrolling as many students given the current and future job market, but if your goal was to create effective policy to discourage programs that don’t benefit graduates while doing no harm, then we have a problem.

Today, the Department of Education announced a round of negotiated rulemaking for December and January to address and create regulations based on the new law. Of particular interest here is figuring out the details of this new accountability portion of the law.

The proposed issues for negotiation in the AHEAD Committee include:

1. Changes in institutional and programmatic accountability measures, including loss of Direct Loan eligibility for certain programs with low earnings outcomes for 2 out of 3 years, and Financial Value Transparency and Gainful Employment.

The proposed regulations will come out August 7th.

On one hand, I’m excited to see if this process will allow for improvements and fixes to the flawed language of the bill. On the other hand, I’m not sure how much leeway there is to fix what is explicitly written into law.

Of course, I would love to be nominated to be on that committee, even if there is no constituency group mentioned that I fall into. I am not sure if that comment is light hearted or serious.

College and University Finances

Inside Higher Ed published its annual survey of Chief Business Officers (CBOs), and it presents a fascinating read. But not a pleasant one.

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