The Higher Education Act

The Higher Education Act

Author: Congressional Research Service

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2015-01-16

Total Pages: 50

ISBN-13: 9781507736722

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The Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA; P.L. 89-329) authorizes numerous federal aid programs that provide support to both individuals pursuing a postsecondary education and institutions of higher education (IHEs). Title IV of the HEA authorizes the federal government's major student aid programs, which are the primary source of direct federal support to students pursuing postsecondary education. Titles II, III, and V of the HEA provide institutional aid and support. Additionally, the HEA authorizes services and support for less-advantaged students (select Title IV programs), students pursing international education (Title VI), and students pursuing and institutions offering certain graduate and professional degrees (Title VII). Finally, the most recently added title (Title VIII) authorizes several other programs that support higher education. The HEA was last comprehensively reauthorized in 2008 by the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA; P.L. 110-315), which authorized most HEA programs through FY2014. Following the enactment of the HEAO, the HEA has been amended by numerous other laws, most notably the SAFRA Act, part of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-152), which terminated the authority to make federal student loans through the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program. Authorization of appropriations for many HEA programs expired at the end of FY2014 but has been extended through FY2015 under the General Education Provisions Act. This report provides a brief overview of the major provisions of the HEA.


Between Citizens and the State

Between Citizens and the State

Author: Christopher P. Loss

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0691148279

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This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.


Degrees of Inequality

Degrees of Inequality

Author: Suzanne Mettler

Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)

Published: 2014-03-11

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0465044964

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America’s higher education system is failing its students. In the space of a generation, we have gone from being the best-educated society in the world to one surpassed by eleven other nations in college graduation rates. Higher education is evolving into a caste system with separate and unequal tiers that take in students from different socio-economic backgrounds and leave them more unequal than when they first enrolled. Until the 1970s, the United States had a proud history of promoting higher education for its citizens. The Morrill Act, the G.I. Bill and Pell Grants enabled Americans from across the income spectrum to attend college and the nation led the world in the percentage of young adults with baccalaureate degrees. Yet since 1980, progress has stalled. Young adults from low to middle income families are not much more likely to graduate from college than four decades ago. When less advantaged students do attend, they are largely sequestered into inferior and often profit-driven institutions, from which many emerge without degrees—and shouldering crushing levels of debt. In Degrees of Inequality, acclaimed political scientist Suzanne Mettler explains why the system has gone so horribly wrong and why the American Dream is increasingly out of reach for so many. In her eye-opening account, she illuminates how political partisanship has overshadowed America’s commitment to equal access to higher education. As politicians capitulate to corporate interests, owners of for-profit colleges benefit, but for far too many students, higher education leaves them with little besides crippling student loan debt. Meanwhile, the nation’s public universities have shifted the burden of rising costs onto students. In an era when a college degree is more linked than ever before to individual—and societal—well-being, these pressures conspire to make it increasingly difficult for students to stay in school long enough to graduate. By abandoning their commitment to students, politicians are imperiling our highest ideals as a nation. Degrees of Inequality offers an impassioned call to reform a higher education system that has come to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, socioeconomic inequality in America.


Summer Melt

Summer Melt

Author: Benjamin L. Castleman

Publisher: Harvard Education Press

Published: 2020-01-15

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1612507433

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Under increasing pressure to raise graduation rates and ensure that students leave high school college- and career-ready, many school and district leaders may believe that, when students graduate with college acceptances in hand, their work is done. But as Benjamin L. Castleman and Lindsay C. Page show, summer can be a time of significant attrition among college-intending seniors—especially those from low-income families. Anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of students presumed to be headed to college fail to matriculate at any postsecondary institution in the fall following high school. Summer Melt explores the complex factors that contribute to this trend—the absence of school support, confusion over paperwork, lack of parental guidance, and the teenage tendency to procrastinate. The authors draw on findings from fields such as neuroscience, behavioral economics, and social psychology to contextualize these factors. Drawing on a series of research studies, they show how schools and districts can develop effective, low-cost, scalable responses—including counselor outreach, peer mentoring, and using text messages and social media—to help students stay on track over the summer. Summer Melt offers very practical guidance for schools and districts committed to helping their students make the transition to college.


Minority Serving Institutions

Minority Serving Institutions

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2019-02-05

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0309484448

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There are over 20 million young people of color in the United States whose representation in STEM education pathways and in the STEM workforce is still far below their numbers in the general population. Their participation could help re-establish the United States' preeminence in STEM innovation and productivity, while also increasing the number of well-educated STEM workers. There are nearly 700 minority-serving institutions (MSIs) that provide pathways to STEM educational success and workforce readiness for millions of students of colorâ€"and do so in a mission-driven and intentional manner. They vary substantially in their origins, missions, student demographics, and levels of institutional selectivity. But in general, their service to the nation provides a gateway to higher education and the workforce, particularly for underrepresented students of color and those from low-income and first-generation to college backgrounds. The challenge for the nation is how to capitalize on the unique strengths and attributes of these institutions and to equip them with the resources, exceptional faculty talent, and vital infrastructure needed to educate and train an increasingly critical portion of current and future generations of scientists, engineers, and health professionals. Minority Serving Institutions examines the nation's MSIs and identifies promising programs and effective strategies that have the highest potential return on investment for the nation by increasing the quantity and quality MSI STEM graduates. This study also provides critical information and perspective about the importance of MSIs to other stakeholders in the nation's system of higher education and the organizations that support them.


No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005

No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005

Author: Patrick J. McGuinn

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13:

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Education is intimately connected to many of the most important and contentious questions confronting American society, from race to jobs to taxes, and the competitive pressures of the global economy have only enhanced its significance. Elementary and secondary schooling has long been the province of state and local governments; but when George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, it signaled an unprecedented expansion of the federal role in public education. This book provides the first balanced, in-depth analysis of how No Child Left Behind (NCLB) became law. Patrick McGuinn, a political scientist with hands-on experience in secondary education, explains how this happened despite the country's long history of decentralized school governance and the longstanding opposition of both liberals and conservatives to an active, reform-oriented federal role in schools. His book provides the essential political context for understanding NCLB, the controversies surrounding its implementation, and forthcoming debates over its reauthorization. how the struggle to define the federal role in school reform took center stage in debates over the appropriate role of the government in promoting opportunity and social welfare. He places the evolution of the federal role in schools within the context of broader institutional, ideological, and political changes that have swept the nation since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, chronicles the concerns raised by the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, and shows how education became a major campaign issue for both parties in the 1990s. McGuinn argues that the emergence of swing issues such as education can facilitate major policy change even as they influence the direction of wider political debates and partisan conflict. McGuinn traces the Republican shift from seeking to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education to embracing federal leadership in school reform, then details the negotiations over NCLB, the forces that shaped its final provisions, and the ways in which the law constitutes a new federal education policy regime - against which states have now begun to rebel. and that only by understanding the unique dynamics of national education politics will reformers be able to craft a more effective national role in school reform.


Affirmative Action for the Rich

Affirmative Action for the Rich

Author: Richard D. Kahlenberg

Publisher:

Published: 2012-03

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780870785191

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The use of race-based affirmative action in higher education has given rise to hundreds of books and law review articles, numerous court decisions, and several state initiatives to ban the practice. However, surprisingly little has been said or written or done to challenge a larger, longstanding "affirmative action" program that tends to benefit wealthy whites: legacy preferences for the children of alumni. "Affirmative Action for the Rich" sketches the origins of legacy preferences, examines the philosophical issues they raise, outlines the extent of their use today, studies their impact on university fundraising, and reviews their implications for civil rights. In addition, the book outlines two new theories challenging the legality of legacy preferences, examines how a judge might review those claims, and assesses public policy options for curtailing alumni preferences. The book includes chapters by Michael Lind of the New America Foundation; Peter Schmidt of the "Chronicle of Higher Education"; former "Wall Street Journal" reporter Daniel Golden; Chad Coffman of Winnemac Consulting, attorney Tara O'Neil, and student Brian Starr; John Brittain of the University of the District of Columbia Law School and attorney Eric Bloom; Carlton Larson of the University of California--Davis School of Law; attorneys Steve Shadowen and Sozi Tulante; Sixth Circuit Court Judge Boyce F. Martin Jr. and attorney Donya Khalili; and education writer Peter Sacks.


Education, Equity, and the States

Education, Equity, and the States

Author: Sara E. Dahill-Brown

Publisher: Educational Innovations

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781682532720

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Education, Equity, and the States examines how variations in state governance determine how federal initiatives are implemented and makes recommendations for approaching reform from this perspective. The book defines the key ways in which state policy environments differ from one another, illustrates how those differences matter, and encourages reformers to account for these disparities to achieve more sustained and equitable improvement. Drawing on original research, Sara E. Dahill-Brown highlights three major factors that differ from state to state: the number of districts (fragmentation); the degree to which education governance is separated from other political issues (exceptionalism); and how much state legislation tends to impinge on local autonomy (local control). She examines the historical and political trends that have shaped differences among the states and how they affect the impact of education reforms. By identifying typical patterns in state governance, Dahill-Brown suggests ways to work with varying governance structures to lead to more successful and equitable outcomes. Dahill-Brown argues that reformers at every level must routinely assess the appropriateness of their consensus-building and collaboration strategies. With the increasing importance of states in education, her work makes a notable contribution to our understanding of the landscape of education reform.