Today, the Department of Education (ED) announced a timeframe for rolling out the Administration’s proposed College Ratings system. In a post by Deputy Under Secretary Jamienne Studley entitled, “Making it Easier to Pick and Pay for College through Ratings“, the Administration announced that the college ratings system will be ready this Fall and a final version will be ready before the 2015-16 school year.
You can read the post here.
UW Professor Howard Chizek will present his team’s Smart Emergency Response System (SERS) to President Obama and senior White House officials on June 10th.
Chizek is participating in the Smart America Challenge hosted by the White House. The audience will be White House staffers, cabinet members, and White House Press Corps. The UW team is one of about 4 teams presenting. Short presentations will be about policy and impact of the projects.
On June 11, 2014, 24 teams with over 100 organizations will come together at the WashingtonDC Convention Center for a demonstration. This event is open to the public to see demonstrations and hear from speakers from the White House, various Government Agencies, and companies and universities from across America.
For more information about SERS. click here.
On Wednesday, the House Science Committee will mark up HR 4186, the FIRST Act, a bill which will reauthorize NIST, NSF and a host of other federal science-focused programs. This is the 113th Congress’s version of the America COMPETES reauthorization.
While in previous Congresses this legislation has been bipartisan and uncontroversial, the FIRST Act has been increasingly acrimonious through both committee hearings and markups. The political situation has been exacerbated by interactions between NSF and House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), which has been previously chronicled in the Federal Affairs Blog.
The higher education community has been, and remains, concerned about this legislation (and its various iterations) on several issues including: the overall funding level for NSF; directorate-level funding; and some significant policy changes including the public access embargo period.
Of primary concern is the change to not only the overall funding levels, but that Congress now specifically authorizes the various directorates within NSF for funding allocations. NSF has never had individual directorates called out for specific funding levels, which causes Congressionally mandated “winners” and “losers.”
Most troubling is the authorization funding levels. When you compare the proposed NSF authorization levels of FY14 to FY15, there are several notable increases in funding at the directorate level. Some NSF directorates receive significant increases at the expense of others. Here are the numbers:
NSF would receive an overall 1.5% increase.
Some Members of Congress may suggest that the FY15 authorization levels in the FIRST Act provide real funding increases for NSF — the total level of funding for NSF is only up by 1.5% — however, this increase does not cover the cost of inflation (1.7 percent). In reality, NSF would have a .2% cut after inflation.
The Office of Federal Relations will continue to track the legislation as it works through the committee process.
Today, Congressman Rick Larsen (D-WA) introduced the Bereaved Student Borrowers Act. The bill is designed to protect grieving students and students facing family hardship from auto-defaulting on their private student loans and to get better access to information about cosigner release requirements. The bill also prohibits lenders from reporting an auto-default as a result of cosigner death or bankruptcy to credit reporting companies and stops these companies from including this information on their reports.
This issue was brought to light by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which identified significant issues facing private student loan borrowers in a recent quarterly report. As of 2011, approximately 90 percent of private student loans had cosigners, and many of these loan contracts contain clauses allowing the loan to be accelerated into default upon death or bankruptcy of a cosigner, often a parent or grandparent, even when students are making loan payments on time.
The bill has eight original cosponsors, including Reps. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), Niki Tsongas (D-MA), Suzan DelBene (D-WA), Pedro Pierluisi, Denny Heck (D-WA), André Carson (D-IN), William Enyart (D-IL), Peter Welch (D-VT), and James Moran (D-VA).
A fact sheet on the bill can be found here.