Federal Legislation
Congress can and should reform higher education and K-12 education to promote intellectual freedom, academic rigor, equal opportunity, affordability—and limit foreign interference, politicization, and administrative bloat. Our policy recommendations focus on reforms to the Higher Education Act, but include stand-alone suggestions for legislation.
General Principles
The policy background and the principles that guide our recommendations for federal legislation.
Title IV Federal Funds Eligibility
Reforms to reduce administrative bloat, reduce tuition, focus federal aid on needy colleges, and reduce dependence on adjuncts.
Title IV Federal Funds Eligibility
Federal Student Aid
Reforms to simplify student aid programs, make colleges partially responsibility for student loans, provide a legal framework for income share agreements, require student loan buyback programs, increase student knowledge about college debt, and redirect a portion of student aid disbursements from the federal government to the states.
Rigorous Academic Standards
Reforms to eliminate financial aid for remedial coursework and link Title IV eligibility to academic rigor.
Title IX Due Process Protections
Reforms to link federal student loan eligibility to due process protection and require Title IX responsible employees to have criminal defense experience.
Title IX Due Process Protections
Freedom To Learn
Reforms to protect intellectual freedom, require an Intellectual Freedom Charter, and define sex as biological.
De-Politicizing Campuses
Reforms to make intellectual diversity protection a condition of Title IV eligibility, sunset the diversity bureaucracy, defund irredeemably politicized components of higher education, rescind the service-learning authorization, dedicate civics funding to classroom instruction, make speaker intellectual diversity a condition of Title IV eligibility, and require colleges to disclose their speaker fees and honoraria.
America's National Interest
Reforms to limit colleges’ dependence on foreign student enrollment, limit Chinese government influence, mandate transparency about foreign gifts, end international branch campuses in undemocratic countries, reform Title VI area studies grants, forbid sanctuary campuses, and strengthen the U.S. Civics Test administered by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Educational Variety
Reforms to provide equal treatment for for-profit colleges, mandate accreditors to make it easier for new institutions to enter the higher education marketplace, prohibit discrimination against homeschool students, and allow financial aid for dual credit courses.
Equal Opportunity
Reforms to mandate transparency about university’s discriminatory policies, require assessable discriminatory policies, dismantle neo-segregation, and reframe support for “Minority-Serving Institutions.”
Education Department Procedures
Reforms to depoliticize accreditation, protect religious freedom, and replace “peer review” with “expert review.”
Education Department Procedures
College Board
Reforms to facilitate the ability of alternative assessment providers to compete with the College Board and to require the College Board to cut ties with the Chinese government.