Alexander and the witnesses called to testify before the committee—Dr. William E. Kirwan, Chancellor of the University System of Maryland, and Nicholas S. Zeppos, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University—argued that universities are encumbered by some federal regulations, which are costly to enact. With those regulations removed, funds would be freed up that could go back to students or other institutional costs.
Since it was enacted in 1965, the HEA has been added on to and amended such that it and the Code of Federal Regulations on education now are both more than 1,000 pages long.
Another regulatory issue, according to Alexander, is the Department of Education’s Dear Colleague letter, which he said is issued an average of once every working day. The letters, in his view, add greater complexity to interpreting federal law and guidelines.
The HELP Committee released a report on Tuesday listing various recommendations to make regulations easier to implement for Congress and the Department of Education to consider. Kirwan and Zeppos co-chaired the task force.
Alexander said that it was time to streamline the regulations for greater ease of implementation. “No one has taken time to ‘weed the garden,’” Alexander said. “The result of this piling up of regulations is that one of the greatest obstacles to innovation and cost consciousness in higher education has become—us, the federal government.”
To illustrate this point, Zeppos recounted that Vanderbilt calculated how much money the university spends annually to comply with federal regulations. The number was $14 million. Divided out among Vanderbilt’s 12,575 students, that amounts to $1,100 per student in tuition a year.
