Universities are entering a brave new world when they set up collaborative degree or academic programs overseas, and they must be vigilant in ensuring proper academic standards. That was the message accreditors were delivering at a conference here of senior international officers—along with a reminder that the accrediting organizations are watching.

“These are uncharted waters,” said Richard Osborn, a vice president of the Western Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the six regional accrediting agencies. Wielding copies of news articles about recent missteps colleges have taken in international partnerships, Mr. Osborn cautioned, “You get tainted with the brush of these programs being questionable.”

He spoke on Tuesday at the annual conference of the Association of International Education Administrators, which has drawn around 900 attendees from 47 countries for a three-day meeting that concludes on Wednesday.

Problems with programs overseas can put colleges’ accreditation back in the United States in jeopardy, Mr. Osborn and Marsal Stoll, his counterpart from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, said during Tuesday’s session.

Reviewing American colleges’ activities overseas has not been a major focus of regional accreditors in the past, but Mr. Osborn said his agency is paying more attention and recently approved new rules that tighten how credits can be awarded in dual-degree programs, limiting the number of credits in upper-level courses that can be counted toward both degrees.

As a result, a major Chinese-American dual-degree program, which has dozens of participating Chinese and American institutions, is out of compliance and could lose accreditation, he said. (The accrediting agency is allowing a three-year grace period.)

Mr. Osborn and Ms. Stoll hastened to say that increased scrutiny from accreditors should not be read as opposition to colleges’ increasing international activities. “We’re not here to be barriers. We’re here to enforce integrity, quality,” Ms. Stoll said.

Ms. Stoll encouraged institutions that begin academic collaborations abroad to ask themselves a few key questions, such as which partner will vet course content and supervise students and faculty members, as well as how academic credit will be awarded. These are questions, she noted, that accreditors will be raising when they review international-degree programs and collaborations.

Ms. Stoll told the packed conference room about one real-life international joint-degree program that failed to win her agency’s accreditation.

Among its failings, she said, was that the U.S. college did not do sufficient evaluation of faculty credentials and allowed credits from the partner institution to count toward the degree without giving them proper review. The American supervisor was a staff member without real authority to implement policy.

Despite the overview, figuring out which programs must be reviewed by accrediting groups, and what joint activities are permissible, can seem more art than science, many in the audience said.

Ms. Stoll and Mr. Osborn were peppered with questions during a question-and-answer session, and participants lined up a half-dozen-deep after the end of the session with additional queries. One complication is that the differing American accreditors have varying standards of review.

Two high-profile representatives of the Obama administration will hit the road today on a three-day, five-state bus tour to draw attention to successful partnerships between community colleges and businesses.

Amid rising concern over unemployment, the administration prominently called on community colleges and businesses to collaborate more during the White House Summit on Community Colleges back in 2010. Its newest proposal is the Community College to Career Fund, which would provide $8-billion to two-year colleges and states to work with companies to train an estimated two million workers in high-growth industries.

This week, Jill Biden, a longtime community-college instructor and wife of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis will visit several community colleges and employers that are collaborating to prepare students for the work force.

The first stop on their tour is the election-year battleground state of Ohio, where the two women will visit the Columbus State Community College Center for Workforce Development. Begun in 2006, the center provides education and training to both current employees and dislocated workers through partnerships with various industry sectors, including information technology, insurance, and logistics. Roughly 20,000 people have taken courses, most of them several weeks long, over the past six years.

Ms. Biden and Secretary Solis will take part in what the center’s director, Cheryl Hay, calls an “unscripted and genuine” conversation about its work. Former students in the program and industry partners will also participate in the dialogue, in front of an expected crowd of 300 invited guests.

The community college is excited to show off how local businesses are using education “to solve their work-force problems,” Ms. Hay said. “We feel that we really have a model here for the rest of the country.”

After the Columbus visit, the road trip will continue to two other Ohio locations. In Centerville, Ms. Biden and Secretary Solis will tour a production line at a biomedical company, along with officials of Sinclair Community College and its development partner, BioOhio. Later, they will visit Cincinnati State Technical and Community College.

On Thursday, Ms. Biden and Secretary Solis will visit Bluegrass Community and Technical College, in Lexington, Ky.; Roane State Community College, in Harriman, Tenn.; and Wytheville Community College, in Wytheville, Va.

The tour winds up on Friday at Davidson County Community College, in Thomasville, N.C.

The timing of the tour, and the notion that it may be part of a Democratic re-election strategy, didn’t bother Ms. Hay, of the Columbus center. The attention, she said, would allow the center to broaden its outreach to businesses and workers.

On February 9, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, introduced a bill on the Senate floor entitled the “Student Right to Know Before You Go Act.” The bill gained bipartisan and bicameral support when it was introduced in the House by Duncan Hunter (a Republican from California and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education).

Hunter and Wyden have been working together to increase the quality of educational data and improve transparency in measures of the success of colleges and universities. This proposed legislation was the product of this work. While its chances of passage are likely low, it is a smart piece of legislation that could help transform our expensive and inefficient system of postsecondary education.

A key provision of the bill would support states in expanding or creating postsecondary student level data systems that include measures of student success in the labor market (including average individual annual earnings by educational program, degree received and educational institution) from all institutions within the state, public and private (nonprofit and for-profit). It presents a much smarter approach to measuring what is called “gainful employment” than the U.S. Department of Education has managed so far.

In 2010, the Department of Education waded into the issue of the labor market returns of college degrees. This foray was tied to proposed regulations that would punish institutions whose students were not earning sufficient income to pay off their student debts. Whatever the merits of the idea, the department set off a firestorm with its regulations and with the quality of the data it released in August of that year.

The proposed regulations would have shut down a large number of the programs run by for-profit institutions plus some community college programs as well (like so much else surrounding the gainful employment debate, the number of programs affected was hotly contested). The department backtracked on the original regulations and last year issued watered down regulations. There was much to dislike about the department’s efforts, but one of the most problematic was putting the regulatory cart before the data horse. In short, the database to support the high-stakes regulations was at best thin and cast doubt on the department’s ability to base any gainful employment regulations on a sound foundation.

The department’s data capacity will be tested again next month, if it can stick to its plan to release new data on the labor market success of students in career-oriented programs. This time around, the Department is using wage data from the Social Security Administration and matching it to student debt data it holds within its Federal Student Aid office.

No one knows how good the matched data will be, and since the Social Security Administration (rightfully) has limited the ability of anyone outside of government to look at the merged dataset — and since the stakes (although lower than proposed in 2010) are still high — there will likely be a major dustup when the data are released.

This is why Wyden’s bill is smart: it builds the database first, and puts the linked data into the public sphere without the heavy-handed threat of government closure of programs.

Wyden’s approach gives everyone the opportunity to probe, poke and prod the data to develop a better sense of their limits and their strengths. Regulations can come later, but in the meantime, the availability of these data will allow students and their families to make more informed choices about the likely outcome of their investment of time and money in a given program in a given school. The data will also allow state policy makers to judge the rate of return on their state’s investment of taxpayer monies in different programs.

We can already anticipate some of the responses to this legislation: that we shouldn’t judge colleges on a single number like salaries or the return on investment, that college education is about so much more than simply finding a job, that many of the societal benefits of having an educated population will not be measured, and so on. Of course many of these statements are true.

But the national commitment to higher education is largely about economic development and creating a skilled competitive workforce. Would the Obama administration be pushing its ambitious postsecondary agenda if colleges just taught students to parse Proust? Would students flock to colleges and universities to learn postmodern poststructural critical theory? Students, their families, taxpayers, and government officials need to know the likely returns for investing so much time and so much money in the pursuit of a degree. And the Wyden bill is likely to get this information into the public sphere faster than any other approach we are currently pursuing.

On a more wonky note, the Wyden bill will help force the revision of the nation’s “premiere” data system for collecting information on colleges and universities. The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) was a reasonable data collection system in the middle of the last century, but to say it is creaky gives it more than its due.

In a nutshell, IPEDS is based on aggregated data collected for a declining number of postsecondary students (it already covers less than half). IPEDS needs to be replaced with student-level data such as the Wyden bill calls for. Wyden’s bill also makes the states full partners in this new IPEDS model, recognizing their critical role in higher education policy. In doing this, the IPEDS burden will be reduced for a great many institutions that submit both IPEDS and student data to the state.

In 2006, Congress banned the federal government from itself holding such a data system. At just about the same time, it authorized the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for the states to create them. Wyden’s bill will have these state systems brought together for a national view of the data, while prohibiting the feds from having access to personally identifiable information. This would improve the payoff of the nation’s investment in these data systems and keep the action at the state level, where it belongs and where, under current legislation, it can actually take place.

Colleges and universities need to better measure the progress of their students as they work toward their degrees, they need to better measure what their students are actually learning, and they need to better measure how well students are doing in the job market after they graduate. Only then can we increase transparency and improve accountability. Wyden’s bill has many of the pieces of the puzzle right, and if it became the law of the land, it would mark a major step forward in improving postsecondary education.

Rick Santorum last week told an audience at the Detroit Economic Club that President Obama “had a war on private education” and that his administration has unfairly attacked private-sector, or for-profit colleges, that do most of the worker training for new jobs, according to a transcript published by The Detroit Free Press. The surging Republican presidential candidate promised that his administration would have a different attitude.

“He believes that private sector schools are somehow evil and they’re abusive, and his Education Department has done everything they could to make it harder for them to compete for loans and other things and to stay in business,” Santorum said. “Yet they are going to be the principal tool, along with community colleges, to respond to this, what I believe will be exploding demand for skilled and semi-skilled workers to do the jobs of the future.”

This past fall, Occupy Wall Street protesters around the country called for far-reaching changes in our society, including forgiveness of student-loan debt. While we believe loan forgiveness is a bad idea for a variety of reasons, we also think the protesters are right in calling attention to the nation’s Byzantine and inefficient system of student lending. Here are a number of beneficial steps that policy makers can take to begin to fix our student-loan system.

Drop bankruptcy protection for private student loans.

Since 2005, private student loans have been nondischargeable in bankruptcy. But the government already provides $104-billion in loans for higher education, a sum that should meet the needs of students. Moreover, what is the rationale for setting limits on the total amount students can borrow in the federal loan programs, but then allowing private student loans to circumvent those limits?

Nor is this an oversight with no ill effect—a new report of ours shows how such loose lending leads to higher tuition. Essentially, because there is no measure of quality in higher education, colleges can’t compete based on either quality or value. Colleges, therefore, compete among themselves for relative standing, meaning there is no limit to what they will spend in the pursuit of excellence. Because colleges have an insatiable need for revenue, it is only a matter of time before they exploit the increase in the ability of students to pay that loans provide. Law schools are the best example of this phenomenon, and the predictable result is huge tuition inflation and unsustainable debt acquired by many students.

Ending the special protection for private loans would be a good start to putting a stop to these trends (though only a start) and would encourage lenders to perform due diligence, colleges to tame their tuition increases, and students to choose less-expensive options.

Eliminate Perkins Loans.

The Perkins Loan program is a campus-based aid program in which colleges are given significant discretion in determining the recipients of federal aid, which is the first red flag. Red flag No. 2 is that the allocation of aid among institutions is not determined based on the need of students, but rather by past allocations. The aristocratic colleges have been remarkably successful in defending their unjust perks, so much so that a student at a very high-cost institution is 15 times more likely to receive a Perkins Loan than a student at a lower-cost institution. We find this a highly questionable use of scarce financial-aid dollars.

Stop using cost of attendance to determine aid eligibility.

Currently, the amount of aid a student qualifies for depends in part on his or her college’s cost of attendance, which is the total amount needed to complete a full year of college. Consequently, those students enrolled at an expensive college will tend to be eligible for more aid than those students enrolled at lower-cost institutions. While grant caps and loan limits prevent this from being an unmitigated disaster, at the margin, this does nothing to encourage cost control on the part of colleges and cost consciousness on the part of students. A much-better approach would use some reasonable base for every college or program, such as the median cost to attend. This would give more-expensive colleges an incentive to cut costs and provide lower-cost colleges more resources with which to expand or improve.

End the income-based repayment program.

Under this new plan, if participants pay up to 15 percent of monthly discretionary income for 25 years, any remaining balance is forgiven (meaning taxpayers eat the cost), and President Obama recently authorized lowering these to 10 percent and 20 years, effective this year. This program is problematic for a range of reasons, but the most important one is that if students are borrowing too much money to realistically pay back, then the solution shouldn’t be to set up a Rube Goldberg-type scenario that allows them to keep borrowing too much in the hope that we’ll figure out how to pay for it in 20 years. To borrow a wonderful phrase from Wolfgang Münchau, “This is the equivalent of putting explosives into a can, before kicking it down the road.”

Revamp the government’s student-loan program.

While all of the above ideas are worth pursuing, the most fundamental goal for fixing student lending is a rethinking of the concept itself. Almost four decades ago, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education noted that “Traditional loan concepts, borrowed from the world of commerce and industry where the physical plant suffers from depreciation and obsolescence, are not equally appropriate to investment in human capital.” As a country, we have yet to come to terms with this and develop new debt instruments based on the characteristics of human rather than physical capital.

Human capital lending would likely treat the loan recipient’s higher earnings from education as collateral. One way to accomplish this is through income-contingent loans. A problem with the existing systems in other countries is that the government does the lending. We feel that having the private sector do the lending has a number of advantages.

As described in a study of ours, the first advantage is that interest rates (and potentially loan amounts) are freed from politics. When politicians set interest rates, they do not do so with the return on investment and the riskiness of the loan in mind, with predictable budgetary consequences. The second advantage is that it would free up billions of government dollars a year for other uses. The third and most important advantage of private lending over government lending is that the interest rate would vary based on the borrower’s choice of major and academic performance.

For instance, a private lender interested in being repaid would not offer the poorly performing law student (a field with a surplus of graduates) a loan on the same terms as the stellar nursing student (a field with a shortage of graduates), but that is exactly what the government does. Relying on private lending would increase the number of nursing students and decrease the number of law students, a socially desirable outcome that cannot be achieved when the government is the lender.

Specifics aside, the larger point is that efforts to restructure student loans to stop treating them like an investment in a factory and start treating them as an investment in human capital are very promising for students and for society.

How does a university lose an artwork and then accidentally sell it? The astonishing saga is detailed in today’s New York Times. When the University of California at Berkeley took possession of the California School for the Deaf and Blind building, in the 1980s, it obtained a rare 22-foot-long wood-carved sculpture, designed for the building in the 1930s by the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance artist Sargent Johnson. But as the building deteriorated, the university removed the sculpture to storage space, where it was considered safer. Then, over some 20 years, Berkeley lost track of the artwork and eventually labeled it “surplus” property. In 2009 it sold the carving for $164.63 (including tax). The buyer then resold the sculpture, and it now resides at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, in California. The purchase price was not disclosed, but an expert in African-American art estimated it at more than $1-million. A Berkeley official said the university regretted its “error of ignorance.”

Foster Washington knows the odds are against him. The Los Angeles Southwest College student is a 20-year-old from a tough neighborhood in Watts where, he says, there was little encouragement or preparation for college.

Recent studies suggest that students such as Washington are the least likely to stay in school, get a degree or transfer to a four-year university, hampering their future job prospects.

But Washington is determined to be the first college graduate in his family of 12 siblings. Southwest, part of the nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District, is trying to fulfill his goal through new programs focused on intensive tutoring, faculty training and helping students adjust to college life.

“I have no time to hang out on the street with my homies; I want to be at school every day,” Washington said after a recent English class that he said is his favorite. “Coming here gives me a sense of worth.”

He is eager and engaged, particularly when discussing the writings of Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass in the all-male class. It is a remedial class aimed at students who need additional preparation before enrolling in college-level English; two tutors are on hand to supplement the instruction of the professor.

The class is part of a program geared to young men of color, but nearly all of the 8,000 students at Southwest have unmet social and academic needs, said Patrick Jefferson, dean of student services. About 96% need remedial math and English, and many are the first in their family to attend college. They grew up amid crime and poverty and graduated from local high schools that are among the lowest-performing in the state, he added.

“Our students don’t leave those issues at the front door,” Jefferson said. “But we’re getting there.”

The challenges facing Southwest and community colleges nationwide are borne out by a trio of studies released last week by the Civil Rights Project, a social science research group at UCLA.

The studies found that black and Latino community college students in Southern California are failing to advance because many have graduated from low-performing high schools that ill-prepare them for college work. These students then end up at similar two-year institutions with poor transfer records.

One of the studies analyzed high school graduates and the transfer rates of students after six years at 51 community colleges in Ventura, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange and San Diego counties. It found that students who graduated from high schools with large minority populations, low test scores and low numbers of parents with college degrees were far less likely to transfer to a four-year institution.

The likelihood of attending a low- or high-performing high school was strongly related to race and ethnicity, the studies found. Patterns of high school segregation — by race, ethnicity and poverty — continued in the community college system because students typically attend the college closest to home.

The patterns have broad implications for long-term economic and social stability, the studies conclude, because nearly 80% of black and Latino students in the postsecondary system attend a community college and only about three in 10 transfer within six years.

“If we can’t figure out how to revise the system in a dramatic way, we’re going to be on a path downward,” said Gary Orfield, who co-directs the Civil Rights Project. “We have to face up to it if we don’t want to have horrible economic and social consequences.”

Southwest is nearly 70% black, and about 29% of its students transfer after six years, compared with 37% of students countywide, according to the Civil Rights Project study. Southwest and other campuses in the district have embarked on a three-year effort to smooth a path for students before they stumble, said Yasmin Delahoussaye, the colleges’ vice chancellor for institutional effectiveness and educational programs.

The nonprofit Achieving the Dream initiative, based in Maryland, provides coaches and advisors to more than 150 community colleges around the nation who help develop strategies to boost student outcomes. Early results from the Southwest program are expected in the spring.

California’s budget crisis has led to soaring tuition and cutbacks at every level, with tens of thousands of students who can’t get classes being turned away from community colleges. The governing board of the state’s 112 community colleges recently approved a broad set of reforms intended to help students obtain associate’s degrees and transfer to four-year universities.

But Orfield and others say the proposals are not sweeping enough and fail to address the most pressing problems. They contend that the California Master Plan for Higher Education, adopted in 1960, should be rewritten to allow community colleges with strong programs to grant baccalaureate degrees. State Assemblyman Marty Block (D-San Diego) wrote legislation in 2010 to establish a pilot baccalaureate project at several community colleges that failed to move forward.

“We need to make sure that students who get to college get out” with a degree, Block said.

Motivated students such as Washington will be a big part of any improvement. After graduating from Washington Preparatory High School, he moved from Watts to Redondo Beach to get away from an environment that could hold him back; and he has already set his sights on transferring to Morehouse College or Clark Atlanta University, two historically black colleges, he said.

“After that I want to come back to my neighborhood and help others, because I know where they’re coming from and I’ve been where they’ve been,” Washington said.

Community colleges can improve graduation rates by offering a course that teaches students how to navigate college with lessons on study skills, time management and how to find the bursar’s office. Yet while “student success” courses are increasingly common, resistance remains strong at many community colleges.

That’s because all courses come with costs, through hiring or shifting faculty, finding classrooms and creating curriculums. And some academics don’t like the idea of spending limited resources or awarding credit on classes that teach note-taking or other basic skills.

Another challenge is turf wars over deciding which department should manage a student success course. If the class is housed in the communications department, for example, that probably means communications can include one less traditional course among its offerings.

It can also be controversial to ask students to pay for a success class, which are sometimes seen as a patronizing extension of high school, but are typically 1-3 credits, and count toward degrees or credentials as would an English or math class.

Yet research strongly suggests that taking the plunge on a student success course is a good move for two-year colleges.

Take Tulsa Community College, which for four years has required that about 1,000 incoming students take its “Academic Strategies” course. Those students are 20 percent more likely to remain enrolled at the college than students who don’t take the course, according to data collected by the college, and they also perform better in academic coursework.

Other community colleges have seen similar results. At Durham Technical Community College, for example, students who take the course have shown a 30 percent increase in retention.

Rachel Singer is a fan of student success courses. She’s vice president for community college relations and applied research at Achieving the Dream, which supports such offerings.

“Once you’ve seen what the results are, it’s kind of a no-brainer,” said Singer, who helped develop a student success course at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, where she worked previously. That course improved student retention and graduation rates. And Singer said a survey showed it eventually won over the faculty, who believed the course was an “irreplaceable” form of student support.

Rare Requirement

Many community colleges require that students with remedial needs take success courses. Some experts, however, say two-year colleges should go further, and make all first-time students take them.

“Research indicates that students who complete these courses are more likely to complete other courses, earn better grades, have higher overall GPAs and obtain degrees,” according to a new report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement.

The sector is generally wary of mandatory requirements, in part because of an unwillingness to impose burdens on students who are more likely to be adults or work long hours at jobs than their peers at four-year institutions. As a result, the report from the center found that only 15 percent of community colleges require student success courses for all first-time students.

“We need to relinquish the reluctance to require,” said Kay McClenney, the center’s director.

For-profit institutions may be more likely to make the courses a requirement. All students at Harrison College, for example, take a class called “Strategies for Success.” And faculty and staff at Harrison must take a two-day training session designed to complement that course and to help college employees work better with students, said a college spokesman.

Houston Community College is among the largest mandatory adopters among community colleges. All entering students who haven’t previously completed 12 college credits — about 12,000 students each fall — take one of five different student success courses during their first semester.

Three of the courses have a specific career focus – like engineering or health care – but all of them “are designed to orient students to the behaviors, expectations and rewards of college as well as support services,” according to the college’s website. Students must pick a major and file a degree plan after finishing the classes.

Of course, success courses vary in quality. McClenney’s group is studying what class content works best.

At Tulsa Community College, faculty members designed the course with help from student focus groups. And they’ve tweaked approaches used in the class, which is housed in the English department, since it was first introduced.

The college had an advantage in scaling up the program. First-time students from local high schools can qualify for a program that waives tuition. The college requires that those students take the success course, and they’re inclined to do so since they’re getting a full ride. Other students at Tulsa can take the course, however.

The college has conducted research on the course’s effect, and found that students who took it were significantly more likely to earn a C or better in 13 of 15 other academic courses.

Who Benefits?

Student success courses got a nod from a task force in California, which has called for a “reboot” of student success policies at the state’s 112 community colleges. But the panel stopped short of recommending that student success courses be required broadly.

Among the recommendations endorsed last month by the system’s board is a requirement that new students “whose diagnostic assessments show a lack of readiness for college to participate in a support resource, such as a student success course, learning community or other support activity.”

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges backed that call. In a resolution, the faculty group said the courses should be offered to “all students who can benefit” from them.

But that implies that not all students can benefit from the courses. And when money is as tight as it is in California, faculty leaders don’t want to waste any resources.

“The well-prepared student might not need such a course and mandating it might merely prevent him or her from reaching his or her goals,” Michelle L. Pilati, the Academic Senate’s president and a professor of psychology at Rio Hondo College, said in an e-mail. She said some first-time students “could already have college experience or might only be needing one class for career advancement or to apply to some other program.”

Which students will be helped by taking the course remains an open question, and one that experts say may only be answered by experimentation. But they say it’s a safe bet that right now, too few students are being steered toward success courses.

A longstanding tradition in American higher education — that undergraduates are charged the same tuition, regardless of major — is eroding, especially at doctoral universities.

That is the finding of a new survey by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. Researchers checked the websites of every public institution that awards bachelor’s degrees, and then surveyed some of the institutions identified as having differential rates. A total of 143 public colleges or universities were found to now have differential tuition policies. That figure includes 29 percent of bachelor’s institutions, 11 percent of master’s institutions, and 41 percent of doctoral institutions.

When further analyzing the doctoral institutions, the institute found that a slight majority of flagship universities now have differential rates.

Up until 1980, differential tuition rates within an institution were largely unheard-of, although some colleges did charge laboratory fees associated with certain courses. As state appropriations failed to keep up with growing enrollments and higher education expenses, many public institutions started to charge more for certain programs, arguing either that they cost more to offer, that student demand was greater or that students in these fields were on a track to better-paying jobs than were those studying other fields. But the policies have sometimes been controversial, as some educators have argued that students should be encouraged to pick fields based on their academic interests, not the price tag.

Other findings of the new survey include the following:

• At doctoral and master’s institutions, differential tuition is generally based on a student’s field of study, but at bachelor’s institutions, differential tuition is equally likely to be based on how far along students are in their programs (with juniors and seniors charged more than others, for example).
• The most common majors facing extra charges are business, engineering and nursing.
• Since public colleges and universities started to adopt variable tuition policies, the number doing so has gone up steadily, with no years from 1980 on showing a decline in the number of institutions with variable tuition.

The Cornell Institute’s report does not take a stand on whether differential tuition is a sound policy. But it questions whether so many institutions should be embracing a policy about which relatively little is known (except that it seems to generate revenue).

“The process by which differential tuition policies have arisen and been have spread across American public higher education institutions has not been examined,” the report says. “Neither has there been any research on the possible consequences of differential tuition policies. For example, does differential tuition by major influence students’ choice of majors? Do higher tuition levels for upper-level students affect students’ persistence and graduation rates? If such effects exist, are they larger for students from lower-income families and how do such effects interact with state and institutional financial aid policies?”

House Republicans are looking to move legislation as early as next week that would repeal two Education Department regulations that the GOP says intrude on the authority of states to set education policy.

The Protecting Academic Freedom in Higher Education act, H.R. 2117, was placed on the Rules Committee agenda late last week, a signal that the committee will soon meet to write a rule for floor consideration of the bill.

The legislation would reverse two Education Department rules from 2010, one of which sets out federal rules for how states decide whether to allow colleges and universities to operate within the state. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), the sponsor of the bill, said this could pose a problem for online schools — for example, by forcing them to win authorization from every state that has an enrolled, online student.

A second regulation sets a federal definition for “credit hour.” Foxx argues that this definition is based on how many hours a student is in class, but ignores other ways students might be learning.

In both cases, Foxx argues that the 2010 rules infringe on the authority of states to establish their own guidelines, and could stifle innovations in education.

“At the end of the day, the unnecessary state authorization and credit hour regulations will reduce local control and create uncertainty in postsecondary education,” she said in last year’s markup of the bill. “Instead of over-regulating the nation’s higher education system, we should focus our efforts on simplifying federal involvement and streamlining regulatory burdens.”

The Rules Committee set an amendment deadline for the bill of Monday, Feb. 27, a sign that the committee could approve a rule soon thereafter, which would be followed by floor consideration.