WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans begin work on Tuesday on an extensive rewrite of the law that governs the nation’s system of higher education, seeking to dismantle landmark Obama administration regulations designed to protect students from predatory for-profit colleges and to repay the loans of those who earned worthless degrees from scam universities.
But in its systematic effort to erase President Barack Obama’s fingerprints from higher education, the measure before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce could undermine bedrock elements that have guided university education for decades. One provision alone could do away with the system of “credit hours” that college students earn to complete their degrees.
The bill “addresses many of the ill-conceived mandates handed down by the Obama administration in favor of policies that will allow higher education to meet the current needs of students,” said Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, the committee chairwoman and the chief author of the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity Through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act.
Many elements of the bill to be formally drafted on Tuesday would pursue bipartisan goals: simplifying the federal financial aid process, cutting down on student debt and expanding programs like federal work study.
But the bill’s efforts to roll back the Obama legacy will divide Congress and the education community along partisan lines. Two of the Obama-era regulations of for-profit colleges and universities — called “gainful employment” and “borrower defense” — are being rewritten by Betsy DeVos’s Education Department. Under the House bill, they would be repealed and blocked from readoption.
