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Don’t expect many more congressional hearings on Higher Education Act reauthorization, Rep. Virginia Foxx said today; lawmakers are eager to move on to the committee mark-up process.

In the next few months, Foxx said, the House and Senate will introduce separate bills that she hopes to move on parallel tracks through to conference committees.

But that doesn’t mean there will be a new HEA on the books anytime soon, the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training chairwoman said at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation’s annual conference this morning.

“The Senate takes forever,” Foxx opined, using the eight-page Keystone pipeline bill as a reference point. That legislation will take the Senate at least three weeks to pass, Foxx said, so how long could the body spend on a several-hundred page bill? “A long time,” she answered.

Her goal for HEA reauthorization is to ensure that colleges are held accountable for taxpayer dollars while keeping education within reach for “people of all walks of life and all incomes.”
A former college instructor and president, Foxx quipped that she’s probably the only member of Congress to have gone through not one but three accreditation processes. Foxx wants to explore reforms to accreditation that strengthen the system without needlessly regulating it and to support institutional innovation in areas like distance learning.

Foxx said there’s “a totally different mood” in the new Congress.

“There is a lot of appetite for change right now, and a lot of that’s being driven by the public,” she said. The House will spend much of next week focusing on general deregulation issues, Foxx said — and as a precursor, her Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act will come up in committee today. The bill died after passing in the House last year.