“None of this will be easy. Technological, economic and demographic changes are happening at breakneck speed, continuously raising the stakes for our postsecondary system. But this is a challenge we can’t shirk. The higher education sector is not only ready for these reforms, our students deserve them. Today’s students deserve a new and r...

In today’s higher education landscape, quality has become the most important watchword as institutions navigate new accountability policies and regulations while new providers hope to demonstrate their efficacy and impact with students. For today’s students, quality is much more than an abstract concept: it translates to their prospects for car...

Policy Update: HEA Recommendations We are just two full months into 2018, and critical conversations around postsecondary education are moving forward at the federal level. Higher Learning Advocates has continued its efforts to advance common-sense policy reforms designed to improve outcomes, upgrade quality, and build a system of higher learning t...

Higher Learning Advocates submitted comments, today, to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee leadership with recommendations on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

We need to ensure students in economically distressed communities use their federal aid at institutions with the strongest outcomes—not roll back accountability for precisely those schools most likely to fail their students and produce poor outcomes.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (FEB. 9, 2018) — Today, Higher Learning Advocates released the following statement from Emily Bouck, Policy & Advocacy Director, responding to a budget agreement passed by Congress with a number of provisions affecting higher education. “While the budget deal passed by Congress takes critical steps toward a long-term f...

Today, Congress approved a budget deal, ending a brief government shutdown and agreeing to a framework that would set budget parameters for the next two years. The compromise eventually approved by U.S. Senate leaders included several key provisions that could have a major impact on student success and higher education accountability. Here’...

Today, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) will begin meeting to review the status of accrediting agencies, which play the role of gatekeepers to federal financial aid. We entrust the nation’s system of higher education quality assurance—including accreditors—with ensuring that students use more tha...

In a new special report on adult learners, The Chronicle of Higher Education featured executive director Julie Peller and board member Teresa Lubbers of the Indiana Commission on Higher Education in a forum on how institutions and policymakers can better help adult students complete postsecondary credentials. Download the entire special report...

Current Gainful Employment regulations require programs at for-profit institutions and certain career and technical programs at all other schools to meet certain debt-to-earnings ratios of their graduates or face the loss of eligibility to participate in federal financial aid programs. This week, critical conversations about higher education accoun...

“Issues of quality, outcomes and accountability are on the forefront of members’ minds in a way they haven’t been before,” said Julie Peller, executive director of Higher Learning Advocates, a non-profit founded in 2016 to advance policy that increases student success.

…As Julie Peller, executive director of Higher Learning Advocates, pointed out, despite Congress’s best intentions to move away from standardization and other proposals offering some solutions, the vagueness and ambiguity in the bill may lead to little progress — with accreditors afraid to approve out-of-the-box ideas, and schools and sy...