Here is a selection of articles the Federal Relations team is reading this week:
What to Expect for Higher Education – Issues raised by both Congress and the Administration that will affect higher education this year from new (and more!) regulations by the Administration to how Congress will impacts student loans to how states will address funding shortfalls though tuition freezes to public institutions. Read here at Ed Central and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Meet the New Guy – A profile of the newest member of the Washington State Congressional Delegation, Dan Newhouse.
Rep. Newhouse won the open seat for Washington’s 4th Congressional District. It is the district formally held by Doc Hastings, who retired. Read more about Rep. Newhouse here.
Optimistic Pragmatists – Politico asked some of DC’s biggest Republican, hired-gun lobbyists what to expect from the GOP-controlled 114th Congress. The answer: practical realism. Read More at Politico.
Another blow to Obamacare – Harvard University faculty, some of which helped shape and advise on the creation of the Affordable Care Act, voted to oppose paying increased premiums and out of pocket expenses for their heath care in 2015. An increase the Harvard Administration said was due to impacts and added costs from health care reform. The vote came to late to defer the changes, but read about it in the New York Times.
Redshirts in STEM – UW is borrowing an idea from athletics and automatically admitting students to the College of Engineering. The STARS program enrolls promising engineering students — many of them women and minorities — to give them an additional year of collegiate academic work in an effort to give students a better platform and graduate as engineers. Read Katherine Long’s story in the Seattle Times.
Less $ from State, Mo’ $ is coming from Students (percentage-wise) – The GAO came out with a report in December which revealed that public institutes of higher education now receive more from student tuition than state funding support. The report has some stark numbers about 2012-2013, where state support, on average, fell 32 percent to only 23 percent of total revenue. Learn more from KUOW and the Huffington Post.
Top Science of the Year – Science Magazine ranked the Top 10 Breakthroughs for science in 2014. These include a host of biological, physical, and social sciences. Most importantly, four of these break throughs are the direct result of NIH funding (fountain of youth, diabetes cure, a better understanding of our genetic alphabet, and a better understanding of what is memory). NIH Director Francis Collins highlights the NIH-funded achievements here, with a look forward into what 2015 might bring. Read the whole list from Science Magazine here. And, read Popular Science’s take on what 2015 will bring (we didn’t shoot Katy Perry into space in 2014, so…).