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Now that the Republicans control Congress, what are they doing about higher education? Time will tell, but in my judgment both Senate Education Committee leader Lamar Alexander and House Higher Education Subcommittee Chair Virginia Foxx are saying some sensible things. Both are former college presidents – Rep. Foxx at the community college level, and Sen. Alexander at the University of Tennessee; he is also the former Secretary of Education. But educators are often better talkers than doers: will good rhetoric turn into action?

Rep. Foxx has introduced legislation that would kill the Department of Education’s nascent effort to have college ratings. As a college ranker myself (working to compile the annual Forbes list), I believe they serve a useful purpose, and the more competition in the rankings business the better. But I believe the great strength of American higher education comes from its diversity, and federal government regulation of colleges threatens to stifle it. In the final analysis, the federal rating system is a regulatory device. Moreover, I suspect the Obama Administration will want to use ratings to achieve non-educational goals, such as pushing schools to have a politically correct composition to the student body, with a certain percentage of low income students, certain number of first generation college students, et cetera.

Let’s let a thousand flowers bloom, as the late Chairman Mao used to say – let colleges pursue their own goals, using their own methods, et cetera. Whether the federal government should fund implementation of these goals, however, is an altogether different matter – and, in general, I think the answer should be “no.” Our federal system of government has worked well, and education is a state and local responsibility.

Moreover, Rep. Foxx wants to kill the Education Department’s “gainful employment” regulations. Hurrah for her. In principle, I think there should be minimum performance/loan repayment standards for schools whose students get federal student loan funds, but the way to do that is to force participating schools to have “skin in the game” – absorbing some of the cost of loan delinquency. Above all, the Obama Administration has used “gainful employment” to further its blatantly ideological attack against “for profit” institutions. While a comprehensive gainful employment rule applying to all schools might be justifiable, that is not what we have, and we need to start from scratch, as Virginia Foxx has proposed.

Lamar Alexander knows a lot about public universities from running one and serving as a governor, senator, and education secretary. As the Higher Education Act is up for reauthorization, he wants to get rid of lots of regulations that are excessively complex and of dubious value. A bipartisan congressional task force he created a year ago strongly criticized the Department of Education for its appetite for regulations that pose major annual costs on colleges, with estimates ranging from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars per student. Many of the regulations were imposed without explicit legislation, on such things as on the definition of a credit hour, state authorization rules regarding higher education services, rules on accreditation, and, of course, “gainful employment.”

The Alexander task force report noted that the “gainful employment” rules were 945 pages long – vastly longer than the nation’s foundational document, the U.S. Constitution. A Handbook for Campus Safety and Security Reporting – the regulations on reporting campus crime statistics – is about 300 pages long. For what purpose? Is anyone doing a cost-benefit analysis of all of this bureaucratic red tape and reporting requirements? No.

The political reality is that President Obama can largely prevent the Alexander-Foxx initiatives from coming to past. He can veto bills (although has rarely done so). He can try to have Democrats in the Senate hold up legislation through the filibuster power, but that ability is dissipating as congressional Democrats are showing increased independence from a president who they thought (correctly in my judgment) threw them to the wolves last November and rarely even invites them to the White House. The old champion of browbeating for-profit schools, Senator Tom Harkin, is gone.  Moreover, Congress has the power of the purse, and powerful higher education lobbies like the American Council on Education actually largely agree with the GOP position regarding reducing regulatory overreach.

My guess is that little radical will happen between now and 2017, but at least the past regulatory and ideologically oriented overreach will dissipate a bit, and some incremental progress may be made. None of this, however, deals with the number one federally induced problem: a totally dysfunctional federal system of student financial aid that has raised costs to students, lowered education quality, aggravated college graduate underemployment, failed to promote income mobility, and, who knows, maybe even contributed to global warming. When is Congress going to deal with it?

Richard Vedder directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, teaches at Ohio University, and is an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2015/02/17/senator-alexander-smart-like-a-foxx/