Accountability for All Programs: The Senate’s Proposal Needs Change

In recent days, the Senate released a proposal for reconciliation legislation that included some major potential changes to higher education. While aspects of the bill mirrored a version the House has already passed, one area that looks considerably different across the two proposals is how they seek to hold colleges accountable for their outcomes.

The House bill, as we have previously described, includes a complex framework to force colleges to pay the government back for a portion of their former students’ unpaid or subsidized loans. The Senate bill proposes a more straightforward approach, focused on withdrawing student loan dollars from the lowest-performing higher education programs.

Still, the Senate’s approach to accountability is not without flaws. Most important is that the bill would specifically exclude undergraduate certificate programs from facing accountability for poor student outcomes, even though they are a disproportionate share of the lowest-value programs in higher education and produce an outsized share of student loan defaulters. And while the Senate proposal seeks to hold institutions accountable for low-wage programs, it overlooks programs where graduates make more money, but take on so much debt they are still unlikely to repay their loans.

This brief describes the Senate’s framework and these flaws, and proposes several adjustments to strengthen the accountability proposal.