May, 2024
Washington — This week Harvard Education Press is publishing Lifting the Veil on Enrollment Management, by Stephen J. Burd, editor. The provocative subtitle is How a Powerful Industry is Limiting Social Mobility in American Higher Education. It is a remarkable book, putting a spotlight on little-known college admission and financial aid practices that are devastating to the cause of equal opportunity and to the finances of needy families nationwide.
My contribution to the effort is a chapter on the role of federal student aid in abetting the worst of the industry's practices, along with identifying expeditious remedies available under current law. Other authors offer longer-term remedies that I support, but which, unfortunately, are unlikely to be enacted and implemented soon, if ever. Time is of the essence: many current practices threaten financial ruin for students and families, especially this year with the uncertainty around FAFSA delays. Moreover, the colleges engaging in these practices may themselves be unable to sustain them, and fail.
My chapter makes the case for the Secretary of Education to send program review teams to selected institutions, fundamentally to determine if their largely covert enrollment management practices complement the purposes of Title IV of the Higher Education Act, or if they countervail them. If the latter, the Secretary would use his powers under existing law to limit, suspend, or terminate the schools' participation in Title IV federal student aid.
Among other issues, program reviewers would look specifically for (1) practices of aid packaging and leveraging that undermine federal aid, (2) deception or coercion of parents to apply for loans, and (3) disproportionately bad outcomes for students and families as viewed by race by income. Institutions would have an opportunity to modify their practices before Title IV participation is cut off.
Other remedies are available through consumer litigation. Some of the practices could (and should) be challenged by class action or false claims lawsuits, especially those that violate the terms of multiyear promissory notes, transparency requirements, and misrepresentation prohibitions. Violations are rife.
Three federal agencies need to coordinate their efforts on litigation. The Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Department of Justice have often been working at cross purposes. DOJ has been especially obstructionist in how to address bad practices, seeing the issues only from an antitrust standpoint, rather than in terms of de facto civil rights violations. Peter Schmidt's and Catherine Bond Hill's chapters should be eye-openers for DOJ.
I hasten to add that recent litigation may offer hope. A 2022 private class action lawsuit, alleging that enrollment management practices at seventeen institutions violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, was quickly supported by a statement to the court from DOJ, because the practices at these institutions, DOJ agreed, amounted to collusion to increase the net price of college for the lower income. But that also describes the net effect of the entire enrollment management industry very well. The lawsuit, now in settlement, even notes the work of Don Hossler in making its case. Hossler appears with a chapter in Lifting the Veil and his work, among others', may offer a bridge to close the distance between agency interpretations.
The need for federal agencies to get on the same page is urgent. Chapters by Stephen Burd and Beth Zasloff illuminate the issues at the school and family levels. Their chapters are infuriating to those of us who have been watching the self-inflicted descent of American higher education for too many years, with its attendant hypocrisy regarding race and class. If anyone is still in doubt about what has been going on, who has been doing it and why, the chapters from Neil Swidey, Jon Marcus, Ozan Jaquette (with Karina Salazar and Patricia Martin), Kevin Carey, and Jerome Lucido spell it all out.
May this book turn things around, and quickly.