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Today there are two news stories that provide import updates to our ongoing coverage at On EdTech. One on Gainful Employment (and the FAFSA impact), and one on the University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC). Neither are pleasant but both are important.
The F-Word
While Morgan and I have avoided dealing too directly with the FAFSA debacle, the topic is becoming so important to future regulatory implementations and to future enrollment and financial implications for colleges and universities that we plan to provide more direct coverage.
Today there is an article at Inside Higher Ed describing how the FAFSA situation is directly impacting the implementation of Gainful Employment & Financial Value Transparency reporting requirements.
As colleges and universities scramble to process student financial aid applications and send out award letters, institutions want more time to comply with reporting requirements in the Education Department's new gainful employment and financial value transparency rule. [snip]
In order to provide that information to families, the department is requiring all colleges and universities to report more program-level information, including the total cost of attendance and the amount of private education loans disbursed to students. Institutions will need to submit two years’ worth of data by July 31 unless the department opts to push back the deadline.
A delay is what college administrators and their representatives in Washington, D.C., say they need. Institutions have too little information at this point about how to comply with the reporting requirements, they say, and their staffs are already stretched thin from dealing with the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FASFA), whose launch has been plagued by technical issues and delays.
A bipartisan group of senators echoed those concerns last week in a letter to the department.
This concern was quite evident in my recent post “This Is A Clusterfiasco”.
Morgan and I just got off the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) webinar on the Financial Value Transparency (FVT) & Gainful Employment (GE) regulations that we have described in this newsletter. In particular, these three posts call out that administrators and staff at most nonprofit institutions are not aware or prepared for what is about to hit them based on the FVT regulations.
As these posts call out:
Institutional staff are just now becoming fully aware of the complex reporting requirements of GE&FVT;
The FAFSA debacle is hitting the same staff that will need to report on GE&FVT; and
The US Department of Education (ED) has not provided useful and clear information yet on how to report on GE&FVT.