AACRAO Written Testimony on H.R. 4283

AACRAO Written Testimony on H.R. 4283 for the House Education and Workforce Committee

Statement by Jerome H. Sullivan
Executive Director
American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers  
May 12, 2004

Chairman Boehner, Ranking Member Mr. Miller, members of the committee, my name is Jerome Sullivan and I am the Executive Director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Today, I respectfully submit testimony regarding H.R. 4283, the “College Access and Opportunity Act of 2004,” for the Record.

AACRAO is a nonprofit association of more than 2,300 institutions of higher education and more that 9,000 campus enrollment services officials. Some 5,000 of our members are professionals with responsibilities that include compliance with the Higher Education Act at their respective institutions—public and private, two-year and four-year, large and small. On campuses in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and abroad we are transfer credit evaluators, recruiters, admissions officers, registrars, guardians of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, voter registration conduits, classroom schedulers, graduation facilitators, international student Designated School Officials, deans and provosts . . . we are higher education administrators.

In our view, the “College Access and Opportunity Act of 2004 is highly intrusive legislation that would not only move the federal government into the business of higher education administration—a foray in conflict with 20 U.S.C. §1232a, which prohibits federal control of education—it would also harm students. We believe the bill would shift significant additional costs to students by failing to authorize adequately increased Pell Grant maximum awards, eliminating low-cost consolidation interest rates, and increasing the rate cap on student loans. In addition, certain provisions of the bill would, if enacted, seriously undermine program integrity and could set the stage for a return of the rampant fraud and abuse that plagued student aid programs in the not-so-distant past. Provisions like the 90/10 rule and the 50 percent rule were instituted as consumer protection mechanisms for students and as program integrity assurances for the taxpayers. Despite their effectiveness, H.R. 2483 would eliminate these important provisions without the inclusion of other adequate safeguards. But, these are not the issues I’d like to discuss today.

Even more serious than the financial and program integrity provision of the bill are the highly intrusive provisions on transfer of academic credit. As the association of transfer practitioners on campus, AACRAO believes that the proposed legislative language would have significant adverse consequences for students, taxpayers, and the American tradition of federal non-interference with academic judgments of colleges and universities. Historically, the federal government has wisely allowed colleges and universities to autonomously determine the terms and conditions their students must meet to earn various academic degrees. H.R. 4283 would, for the first time, create a new federal mandate on a fundamentally academic issue, i.e., transfer of credit, and as such, would undermine the ability of institutions to safeguard the integrity of their own credentials.

The United States has the world’s most mobile system of higher education. The Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement has found that the proportion of undergraduates attending multiple institutions of higher education grew from 40 to 54 percent (and among bachelor’s degree recipients, from 49 to 58 percent) during the 1970s and 1980s. Early data suggest the proportion of transfer students surpassed the 60 percent mark in the 1990s. In addition, OERI found that the number of institutions attended by students had no effect on degree completion.

Not only is there every evidence that student mobility is at an all-time high without any documented adverse impact on degree completion, state policymakers and the higher education community are actively working on improving credit portability and making transfer even more seamless. AACRAO, for example, maintains a centralized database of transfer credit practices. The National Transfer and Articulation Network is working to improve inter-institutional articulation agreements. A number of states have put various mechanisms in place to help facilitate inter-institutional portability of academic credit. In view of all these positive developments, a one-size-fits-all federal mandate could not have been proposed at a less propitious time. As the problem the proposed provisions seek to redress is unknown, we are unable to address the concerns motivating legislative action. Congress mandated that the U.S. Department of Education study the transfer issue during the last reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in 1998, yet the Department has not fulfilled its mandate. We fear that federal intrusion into academic prerogatives of the world’s best higher education system will cause irreparable harm to the nation if Congress acts before it has adequate facts at its disposal. We are alarmed because the transfer-related provisions H.R. 4283 are a too blunt an instrument to address any shortcomings in the credit evaluation procedures, and would certainly harm transfer students, institutions of higher education, and the public.

First, the proposed legislation represents a congressional second-guessing of campus academic judgments about course-equivalencies. This imposition of the new transfer mandate represents an unprecedented federal intrusion on the academic autonomy of colleges and universities. Academic degrees are made up of credits and federal regulation of credit-equivalencies is tantamount to a federal degree recognition policy.

Second, credit evaluation is a complex and deliberate process of placing students in courses for which they have the necessary prerequisites. Today’s voluntary system of inter-institutional transfer is based on principles articulated in the industry-recognized Joint Statement on Transfer of Credit that consist of a three-part analysis of incoming academic credits to determine the quality of previous coursework, the comparability of such coursework to courses offered at the receiving institution, and the applicability of the coursework to the program of study the student seeks to pursue. Credit evaluation professionals on campus go to great lengths to correctly analyze transfer applicants’ transcripts and provide fair and accurate equivalencies that avoid duplication of effort and that correctly place these students in the sequences of courses for which they are academically qualified. The proposed transfer provisions would do away with the subtleties of credit evaluation by federally reducing academic credit evaluation to an analytical basis of course comparability and student performance. As such, legislation would undermine academic quality at the same time as it would cause many students to be misplaced in courses for which they are not academically prepared.

H.R. 4283 would require institutions to disclose a statement on their transfer policy and, more importantly, would dictate the substance of an institution’s transfer of credit policy to at least include non-denial of credits solely on the basis of the agency or association that accredited the sending institution, so long as the agency or association in question is recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education. This provision would essentially do away with specialized accreditation by explicitly requiring institutions to treat all agencies and association recognized by the Secretary as interchangeable—technical school credits with medical school credits, law school credits with cosmetology school credits. Further, the proposed legislation would set Secretarial recognition of accrediting bodies—hitherto deemed to be the minimal threshold for participation in Title IV programs—as the de facto ceiling by denying institutions to be more academically demanding than the least rigorous of accrediting agencies recognized by the Secretary.

Third, the legislation would not only hurt students by distorting their qualifications and causing incorrect placements, it would outright deny Title IV eligibility for some transfer students. By mandating that schools award academic credits even for coursework that is not applicable to the students’ academic program, the proposed language would push many students out of eligibility for federal financial assistance by penalizing them under federal Satisfactory Academic Progress regulations that cap the number of credit hours a student can take and maintain Title IV eligibility. This outcome is in direct conflict with the spirit of Rep. McKeon’s legislative efforts to reduce federal red tape in student aid programs through the Fed UP initiative.

Fourth, the proposed legislation would set up new and cumbersome reporting requirements to generate information of dubious value. The bill would require production and publication of credit acceptance statistics based on accreditation status of sending institutions. Yet the bill is unclear as to how reporting institutions would authoritatively determine the accreditation status of each sending institution to the satisfaction of the provision’s enforcement authorities. In mandating this new data reporting burden, the provision provides a partial answer to the problem of escalating college costs that the college affordability provisions of the bill seek to address.

Fifth, the proposed legislation would require accrediting bodies to serve as federal agents in enforcing the transfer mandates by adding three new provisions to Section 496(c). Not only would this be a redundant distraction for accreditors, it would add significantly to the costs of accreditation and represents another costly federal mandate working at cross-purposes with the college affordability provisions. Additionally, the bill contains several additional references to transfer in various disclosure provisions amending Section 485(a)(1) of the Higher Education Act.

AACRAO believes that one-size-fits-all legislative mandates on a complex topic such as credit evaluation would result in poor student placements, diminished quality, and wasted resources. Institutions of higher education have an obligation to their students, their graduates, employers, other institutions of higher education, and the public to protect the integrity of the degrees they confer. In an age when fraudulent credentials are becoming a national and international security problem as discussed yesterday in the Senate, Congress should be strengthening, not undermining, the ability of colleges and universities to control the award of their own credentials.

AACRAO urges the committee to strike the transfer of credit provisions in H.R. 4283 and to support reauthorization of the never-conducted study of transfer that Congress originally required the Department to produce in 1998 since precipitous action is not prudent before the findings of a properly conducted study are available. Further, AACRAO stands ready and willing to assist with the study’s implementation.

I thank you in advance for your consideration of this matter. AACRAO is mindful of your extraordinary contributions to the nation’s students, and is ready to work with you to improve portability of academic credit.