College Lobby Group Will Oversee Flow Of Federal Aid Dollars In New Experiment

Alexander Holt was quoted in Buzzfeed about the Obama administration's decision to allow higher education lobbying groups to oversee the new pilot program exploring access to federal financial aid for alternative programs: 

Two industry lobby groups have been selected to oversee the government’s latest experiment in higher education, which will allow alternative providers like coding boot camps to access federal financial aid money.

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The choice led to raised eyebrows among those skeptical of the industry’s ability to self-regulate.

“There’s an obvious conflict of interest when a trade organization is overseeing its own members,” said Alexander Holt, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. “One of [ACE’s] main jobs is to lobby the federal government so that their members receive more federal money. Why would they then get to determine whether a member should receive federal dollars?”

Both ACE and CHEA would typically be barred from acting as accreditors under federal rules, said Holt, which say that industry groups cannot accredit schools. But those rules don’t apply to the new experiment.

ACE will judge the success of the partnership between Northeastern University, a private college in Boston, and General Electric, which will provide GE employees with fast-tracked bachelor’s degrees in manufacturing. Northeastern is an ACE member; its president, Joseph Aoun, was the chair of ACE’s board of directors in 2013.

Holt compared the selection of ACE as an overseer to allowing a major agricultural lobbying group to oversee the federal farm subsidy program. “It’s crazy in every instance,” Holt said.

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“It’s perplexing for the Obama administration to be proposing this because they’ve spent the entirety of their tenure fighting for-profit schools,” Holt said. “And now they’re opening another door.”