Program Integrity and Institutional Quality - 1/9/24 

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 DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

 OFFICE OF POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION

 PROGRAM INTEGRITY AND INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY 

 SESSION 1, DAY 2, AFTERNOON

JANUARY 9, 2024

On the 9th day of January 2024, the

following meeting was held virtually, from 1:00 p.m.

to 4:00 p.m.
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P R O C E E D I N G S

MR. WEATHERS: Hello, folks. Welcome 

back from lunch. I hope you had a restful one. We had a 

productive morning, and I'm hoping to have another 

productive afternoon. Is- are there any housekeeping 

issues that we need to address before we move forward, 

Greg? 

MR. MARTIN: Yeah, I just wanted to 

say- oh, so, yeah, to reiterate, yes, great discussion 

this morning. The plan for this afternoon, we can 

continue with our discussion of the proposed changes in 

600.9. And then I want to make certain that we have time 

for the three- I believe we had three directed questions 

to you here that pertain to 600.9. So when we're done 

with our general discussion, I want to address each of 

those questions or raise each of those questions, I 

should say, for the committee to address and respond to. 

And then, we are scheduled to move into the discussion of 

distance education at, I believe, 2:15, so I'd like to be 

able to stick with that, because we do have- we have a 

lot to get through this week, so I think we can- I'm 

pretty sure we can meet that schedule and give everybody 

an opportunity just to say what they want to say.

MR. WEATHERS: Alright. Well, with 

that, I would actually hand it back over to you, Greg, to 
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get us started in the afternoon. I believe that we're 

going to endeavor to take a break shortly after two. So, 

just as a heads up for folks.

MR. MARTIN: Yeah, great, I don't 

know, do we have any more remaining discussion? When we 

left, we- I believe we had- we were discussing 600.9. I 

would entertain any further comments there. If not, then 

I would move on to the- to our question. So I'll throw 

that out there.

MR. WEATHERS: It looks likeMR. MARTIN: Oh, we have some hands, 

okay.

MR. WEATHERS: Yep, my apologies. 

Yeah, got a couple hands. Start with Jo. Go ahead, Jo.

MS. BLONDIN: Yes. So I'm new to this 

process, and I just want to understand again and clarify. 

We're responding to DOE's language at this time, correct?

MR. MARTIN: Yes. You are responding 

to DOE's language. I mean, there's nothing- I will say 

nothing precludes you from addressing anything that was 

raised by other members of the committee, either verbally 

or in writing. So I- you know, so I don't think- Carolyn 

did happen to share her proposals in writing and gave 

that to you, but- which is nice to be able to see it. If 

you want to address that, you may. But this- but what you 
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see here in the issue paper is what's being proposed now. 

And that's what's on the table until- unless we come back 

with different text in the next round. Thank you.

MS. BLONDIN: Okay. And my second 

question is just to clarify this, because I didn't really 

get a handle on it from the Department, and there was a 

lot of conversation around, is it in- I mean, I've heard 

it's in the HEA, I've heard that the Department can't 

overrule states. So can we just have some kind of 

clarification around that, maybe in the chat or 

something, just so I can see the rule or I can really 

understand that because the conversation is really going 

back and forth, and I want to understand what that 

specifically states. Thank you.

MR. MARTIN: Sure.

MR. WEATHERS: Alright. Thank you, Jo. 

And next we have JoEllen. Go ahead, JoEllen.

MS. PRICE: Great. Thank you. My 

question is about the complaint piece. I understand the 

governance piece. But during the lunch, I did a little 

bit of research. My current institution is not a 

participating SARA institution, but my prior institution 

is. And, I'm trying to figure out the need for the 

complaint piece, and looking through some research, 

because my biggest concern is how students access 
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institutional complaint processes. I know it can be very 

confusing for students. And so I looked at two large 

online institutions. Their complaint process online is 

very well done. It's explained well. It walks students 

through the process. And in looking at that, I'm going to 

share something in the link. I found the NC-SARA 

Complaint Reports dashboard, which sort of clearly shows 

that complaints are being looked at. They're being 

addressed. They're being reported on. So I'm trying to 

figure out why this language is needed. What is it we're 

trying to address that they're not already doing, when it 

comes to student complaints?

MR. MARTIN: I can address that. I 

think that, first of all, I want to reiterate that the 

proposed regulations are not a- shouldn't be viewed as 

you would view a compliance report, which is to address 

areas of noncompliance that an entity- that have been 

taking place in an entity, you know, violations of 

various different regulations. We're not alleging any 

violations on the part of reciprocity organizations, 

including NC-SARA. And in fact, you know, what we're 

doing is proposing additional rules to strengthen the 

process. And it- I am not wholly familiar with all of the 

complaint procedures at NC-SARA, it being a proprietary 

organization. But I- but what this would do is place into 
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regulation and require a protocol whereby complaints when 

they come in are funneled to the state in which the 

student is located. And I think that's- I mean, even if 

one is to say that they believe that the current 

protocols under which an organization is operating, but 

maybe not required to operate do account for this. I 

don't think that it negates the necessity to place into 

regulation, procedures which ensure that it occurs.

MR. WEATHERS: Alright. Thank you, 

Greg. Moving on. Erika, go ahead.

MS. LINDEN: Yes, thank you. I put 

something in the chat before we broke for lunch. Just 

asking for clarification on the reference that's both in 

the current regulation in (2) and then in (3)(i) about 

the time of the student's initial enrollment, that that's 

one of the states that would need to be involved in this 

complaint process. I'm not- if a student moves to another 

state, I'm not sure that the state of initial enrollment 

is relevant. Shouldn't it be the state in which the 

student is currently enrolled? And so I just didn't want 

to lose track of that consideration. I had several 

comments come to me from other members of the 

constituency about that element. Thank you.

MR. MARTIN: Our purpose- the purpose 

in our in our regulation, which you know, which 
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determines, you know, where the student is and the state 

in which, located the time of enrollment was, 

specifically to avoid the situation whereby institutions 

would be required to monitor, you know, all the time 

where the student is. That would have been, you know, 

burdensome to do. So we key to that regulation here. As, 

you know, an indicator of which state the- a complaint 

must go to. I do concede that it would be- it's possible 

that the student has moved to some other location. But, I 

think generally, the rule would be- would work. And in 

the case of distance where a student would be, you know, 

where they- they obviously could move, but we- but the 

regulation that keys to- but the- this language, you 

know, mirrors the enrollment language we have, which has 

the requirements for identifying whether, you know, 

whether they meet licensure requirements. So, you know, 

then that's what we key to, but it is a point. I mean, we 

could- I mean, certainly if the school is aware, you 

know, if the school is aware that the student has moved, 

I, I think certainly it should go to that state, whether 

it would be a requirement under these rules, the way 

they're written, I'm not sure, but I see Denise has her 

hand up, so I'll let her address that.

MS. MORELLI: I just wanted to note 

for whoever asked, I did put the definition of an 
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institute of higher education in the chat, which talks 

about that the institution, in order to be eligible for 

title 48, has to be, authorized by the state. So whoever 

was asking for that, I did put the definition in the chat 

in terms of the question that just came up. I just know 

that in prior negotiations, in different concepts that 

we've dealt with in the regs, the institutions actually 

thought that where the student initially enrolled was 

easier to track. So we had a lot of comments, I think, 

over the last round and round before that in the various 

thing, concepts that we were trying to deal with, that 

they didn't want to have to track a student all the way 

through. So that's why some of the language that we 

decided on in the regulations deals with where the 

student was initially enrolled. It may not be the best, 

but that was one of the reasons why we came down and 

settled on that.

MR. MARTIN: I also want to correct 

myself in identifying NC-SARA. When I said the 

proprietary organization, I didn't- I misspoke. They're, 

of course, not for-profit. I was just speaking within the 

context of there not being a governmental- that they're 

an independent organization. So thank you for correcting 

me on that note. I just want to make that clarification. 

Thanks, Denise. 
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MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, Greg. And I 

see Dave has his hand up to respond as well. Go ahead, 

Dave.

MR. MUSSER: Yeah, just one more quick 

clarification on that point. Jamie asked in the chat 

about a discrepancy in the language that's used and the 

issue paper. In one case, we say resides, and in another 

case we refer to the student's location at the time of 

initial enrollment. We always mean the latter. Resides is 

just shorthand. And we should have probably used a 

different word there to avoid confusion. But as Greg and 

Denise just explained, that was a decision that we made 

in order to assist institutions in making these 

determinations once, and we would expect that they would 

use the information- that information to determine which 

state the complaints needed to go to in this current 

proposal.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, Dave. 

Alright, moving on. Robyn, you're next.

MS. R. SMITH: Hi. Thanks. I just 

wanted to respond to a point that Jillian raised in theprior to the break. The Department did propose regs that 

would have required schools to certify in their program 

participation agreements, whether they were- that they 

were in compliance with applicable state laws concerning 
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closed school issues, recruiting and false advertising. I 

want to be clear that the Department ended up only 

finalizing the regulation as to closed school 

requirements, number one. And number two, those have 

nothing to state- to do with state authorization because 

they still allow states to decide or exempt whoever they 

want, including distance education schools under state 

authorization reciprocity agreements. So schools only 

have to certify they're complying with whatever laws 

they're required to comply with under state law. And it 

doesn't really change anything with respect to distance 

education schools. The other issue I wanted to raise 

about the NC-SARA complaint process is thank you for 

providing that link. The link is really concerning. And 

the data from NC-SARA is concerning because although they 

oversee over 2400 organizations, I'm sorry, institutions, 

they have less than 100 complaints for 2022 alone. And so 

it seems to me that the state agencies receive far higher 

numbers of complaints typically. And so it concerns me 

that the states even- aren't even getting to- I'm sorry, 

the complaints aren't getting to the states because their 

first- students first have to go to schools. And states 

are very- complaints are very important as well for 

agencies and states to be able to identify patterns and 

practices of illegal behavior going on. So that's another 
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reason it's important for sharing of data. Thank you.

MR. WEATHERS: Alright. Thank you, 

Robyn. Next we have Jillian. Go ahead, Jillian. 

MS. KLEIN: Yeah, thanks. I just- to 

Robyn's comment, and I think this is important because I 

want to make sure I'm understanding Carolyn's proposal in 

general. So I understood what was being talked about in 

terms of allowing states to move forward with educationrelated rules, that it would not require states to do 

that, but it would permit states to do that even if the 

state is participating in a reciprocity agreement. So I'm 

not sure how that's different, I guess, than what you're 

saying. And to my comment before the break, I think the 

Department's- yes, institutions are self-certifying that 

we are adhering to state requirements, but we have to 

adhere to state- I mean, that's- so, I understand what 

you're saying, that it's an institution saying that and 

not sort of on the back end of states doing it. But Ifrom an institutional perspective, it's the same. It 

doesn't matter to us if it's the state saying we have to 

do it, or the Department saying we have to do it. That's 

a requirement that we have to follow. And I would say, 

you know, in terms of the- where the Department landed on 

the final rule that goes into effect in July. Yes, they 

did strip out a couple of the things that had been sort 
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of laundry listed in there. But the Department's 

rationale was that they believed things like 

misrepresentation and the other elements in there were 

already covered by either UDAP provisions or other sort 

of generally applicable rules within the state. So I just 

want to be clear, though, because I think you raised, at 

least for me, an important question, which is my 

understanding of Carolyn's proposal was states can still 

do these things as opposed to states somehow would be 

required to come up with their own education-related 

rules that they would have to impart on institutions that 

are offering distance education programs.

MS. R. SMITH: Sure. Can I answer? 

Yeah. Carolyn's proposal. You're right what it is. It is 

that the states would be able to, in their discretion, 

decide what they want to do. Not that they're required to 

do any kind of- change their laws in any way. As to the 

certification piece, what I meant to say was it requires 

states to certify that they comply with applicable laws 

to the extent that they're even applicable. So it still 

allows states to assign on to a reciprocity agreement and 

waive state laws, state higher education consumer 

protection laws, including on closed school issues. So, 

it doesn't change that if a state has exempted- has a law 

that exempts SARA institutions from having to comply with 
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a closed school provision that doesn't require them now 

to comply with that, hopefully that makes sense. It's 

very confusing. And maybe Carolyn can explain it better 

than me.

MS. FAST: Yeah. If it's my turn, I 

don't know if it's my turn, but yes, I agreeMR. WEATHERS: It is.

MS. FAST: Thank you. Sorry. I agree 

with what Robyn said, that the proposal is definitely not 

requiring states to have any particular protections or to 

enforce those just to ensure that they can do that if 

they choose to. And also, you know, have the benefit of 

the reciprocity agreement for the waiver of the 

requirements that are related to initial and renewed 

state authorization, that the only difference is that 

here we're preserving more discretion for the states 

essentially to have those rules. Whereas under the 

current system, the agreement as it now stands, requires 

states to waive consumer protections. And we're just 

saying the states should be able to, at their discretionbecause, you know, there are states with stronger 

protections for their students. And because of this 

requirement, there are sort of- there's this weird twotiered system where online students in some states have 

different rules depending on where their school is 
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located. And they don't know that. And also, you know, so 

this is not good for students. And it's also not good for 

states who may have- would like to be able to address 

consumer protection problems in their state and are 

constrained by this. This is trying to give them the 

ability to enforce the law if they choose to.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you. Carolyn. 

Okay if there's nothing else as it pertains to 600.9, I'm 

going to hand it back over to Greg.

MR. MARTIN: Thanks, John. So, I want 

to thank everybody for that discussion. And, if we turn 

to page three, I believe, on the issue papers. And I'll 

have Joe bring that up there. So these are questions, 

general questions for discussion under 600.9 that the 

Department is interested in receiving your feedback on. 

And some of this may be redundant of what we've discussed 

already, but I'll open them up anyway. And the issue at 

hand here is that currently, states can exempt an 

institution from state authorization requirements if the 

institution is accredited by one or more accrediting 

agencies recognized by the Secretary, or if the 

institution has been in operation for at least 20 years. 

So, the questions we're going to ask, and I'll ask them 

holistically here, just go through all three of them, and 

then anybody can address any of them that they wish to. 
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How can the Department ensure that state authorization is 

serving its intended purpose in the regulatory triad? In 

what instances are exemptions from the state approval 

requirement appropriate or warranted? Is accreditation 

and/or length of time in operation sufficient for an 

exemption from the state approval requirement? And what 

factors should the Department consider as necessary for 

state authorization? So with that, I'll open the floor 

for discussion.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you. Greg. 

Alright. Barmak.

MR. NASSIRIAN: Well, just to get the 

conversation going, several observations, one of which it 

has been alluded to, but I'll just assert it 

dogmatically, Federal Law contemplates a three-legged 

stool for purposes of program integrity. And, the 

Department is correct in expressing concern, as we have, 

about arrangements where any one of these legs is 

collapsed onto another. And the example of states 

deciding that accreditation can perform double duty as 

whatever it is supposed to do, which, by the way, it may 

not be doing very well, as well as state authorization. 

So I do think maintaining separation between the two nonFederal legs of the triad makes a lot of sense. I also 

kind of ponder an interesting question, which is, is 
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state or is reciprocity intended to provide the same 

level of protection, more protection, given the fact that 

on the internet nobody knows you're a dog, or less 

protection? My understanding was that it was intended to 

provide convenience for institutions that may not have 

the resources to necessarily operate at a national level. 

Again, we live under a Federal system in which the feds 

can regulate and the states can regulate, and large 

corporations live with those facts, right? Emission 

standards. There's all kinds of labor laws. There's all 

kinds of requirements that vary from one state to 

another. And large corporations manage to navigate those 

rules and comply with the applicable laws of every state 

in which they operate. I always thought that reciprocity 

was intended to help smaller institutions that, through 

no fault of their own, happen to offer a distance ed 

program. And lo and behold, two students from another 

state happened to sign up, and that was going to force 

them to go through the entire arduous process of gaining 

state authorization for the sake of those two schools. It 

may be worth contemplating whether there is a footprint 

of enrollments above which you really ought to go through 

the front door, of obtaining direct authorization, so 

that we can limit the scope of reciprocity to those [30 

seconds]. We'll stop with that. There's plenty more to 
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say, but I'll stop. 

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you. Alright, 

moving on. John, go ahead. 

MR. WARE: Thanks. And just to respond 

to Barmak's question there briefly, I think from the 

institutional perspective, authorization was, yes, more 

of a convenience issue. They didn't have to go to every 

state, although at the time many of the larger for-profit 

institutions had already gone through that process. So 

they effectively had a competitive advantage. So it was 

really the state institutions and some of the larger 

nonprofits who at that time, you know, were the primary 

beneficiaries of reciprocity because they didn't have to 

go through that process of getting- going to every state 

and asking if they had to be approved. So, you know, one 

could argue who's the beneficiary now. But at that time, 

I think those were the institutions that benefited. But 

getting back to the questions raised by the Department 

and appreciate Greg and the Department bringing thosethese questions up because I think they're good 

questions. And as you know, and I'm sure those who are 

familiar, states are all over the place in these 

exemptions, and most of them are things that have been in 

state law for long periods of time. You know, we have, 

exemptions by accreditation. If they're accredited, 
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they're exempted as the question states, if they've been 

in operation for 25 years are exempted. And, you know, I 

don't- we don't have any of these exemptions that I'm 

aware of in Ohio. But they do come up from time to time. 

We have institutions or professions lobby to have 

themselves exempted from regulation. We almost every time 

oppose it at the state level. And I'm sure many other 

regulatory agencies have opposed these types of 

exemptions in the past. But, you know, for whatever 

political reasons, many times they get into state laws 

and, you know, they- like I said, a lot of them have been 

there so long that I don't think people can even remember 

why they got put in there in the first place. So I think 

it's a good discussion piece. I'd like to, you know, talk 

to my colleagues in other states and see, you know, what 

are your exemptions? How do they apply? What are you 

really exempt from? That's another good question. You 

know, are you exempt from everything? Are you exempt only 

from certain regulations. So it's really all over the 

board I think, with states on this issue.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, John. 

Jillian, you're next.

MS. KLEIN: Sure. I have a question 

for the Department. I'm wondering how many states 

provide- the sort of basis of this question, how many 
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states have exemption processes that you're- that are 

sort of the concerning basis of these questions? Just to 

start there.

MR. MARTIN: I don't know the number 

off the top of my head, but I will endeavor to see if we 

can get that.

MS. KLEIN: Okay. My understanding, at 

least from an exemption related to accreditation, is 

there's only four states. And I don't have a dog in this 

fight, really. But I just think it's an interesting 

conversation. I think there's only four states that offer 

licensing by means of accreditation LBMA, including 

California. And my understanding of that process is that 

it's not sort of a blank check in terms of institutions 

being authorized by the state. They still have to 

demonstrate financial responsibility. They're still 

requirements that the institutions adhere to state 

requirements. There's typically an annual review that's 

undertaken by the state. So I think for me, for the 

purposes of being helpful in this conversation, I would 

just- it'd be helpful to me to better understand, sort of 

the Department's concern and the depth of the concern, 

since I'm only aware of those four states that offer any 

sort of exemption process. And even within that, there 

are still sort of guardrails that, at least to some 
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extent, offer protections from a consumer protection 

perspective. And in many of those states, they do still 

require, a surety bond or paying into a [inaudible], 

etc., for the school to be able to operate in the state. 

So I think just to be a helpful contributor to this 

conversation, it'd be helpful to me to get more 

information from the Department about the spirit of the 

questions.

MR. MARTIN: I see Denise has raised 

her hand, John. Could youMS. MORELLI: So the Department is 

doing research on this right now, but we've determined so 

far that a large majority of the states have some form of 

exemption. You have the accredited exemption, California 

being a prime example. There's exemptions in other states 

for religious organizations- religious entities, 

religious programs. There's others that are done by 

charter. Some of the old northeastern schools. There's 

other ones that are done by the length of like a certain 

set time, 1943, 2000, certain whatever timeframe. We're 

compiling that and hope to get that to everybody. So 

thank you, Jillian. But I just want to let everybody know 

that we've- are doing some research on it and hope to get 

the data out to the negotiators.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, Denise. I 
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see that Scott Dolan's coming to the table. Welcome, 

Scott. And next, Robyn. Go ahead.

MS. R. SMITH: Hi. Sure. So my 

understanding of most state laws and- including 

California's is that if they're exempt, they are actually 

not subject to any type of authorization or requirements 

of the state law. At least that's the case in California. 

In California, states that are exempt can sign on to be 

part of the complaint process so they can have a 

complaint procedure, which is currently required under 

Federal Law. But other than that, if they are exempt, 

they are not required to comply with anything, to provide 

any reporting, to get authorized in any way. I suspect 

that's the same with other state laws, but I would have 

to see them. So, that's just to clarify on that point. 

The other point as to what John said is, I think a lot of 

these laws are fairly old, especially a lot of them were 

passed in the early 90s, and/or in the 90s. And so 

they're kind of holdovers from a prior sort of regime, 

especially with the long-term exemptions that schools 

that were in existence for a long time, you know, the 

market has really changed, especially for for-profit 

institutions at the time a long- you know, back in the 

90s, there were, you know, for-profit institutions that 

were owned and maybe it was a valid basis at that time to 
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assume that they were stable organizations providing a 

good education. Since that time, of course, things have 

changed. And we see, for-profits and nonprofits changing 

hands quite often. And once they are changed- the 

ownership has changed, it can really present a lot of 

risks for students and taxpayers depending on who's 

taking ownership. So I think there is a question about 

the 20-year, the long term type of exemption, especially 

when it comes to certain types of institutions that have 

a lot of transfers of ownership.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, Robyn. And I 

see that Rob is in for John Ware and also has his hand 

up. Go ahead, Rob. 

MR. ANDERSON: Thank you much. Just a 

quick question for the Department. I think this is a very 

engaging discussion, and I think we know all of thesesome of these exemptions and the research we've done at 

SHEEO on all 50 states, it's scattered across the board 

of how different states approach this issue. And some, 

you could argue, have much more, bolstered processes than 

others. And we're working with a cohort of states and 

academic researchers to try to strengthen some of these 

principles, but kind of with that as a backdrop, you 

know, I'm just curious from the Department regarding your 

view on kind of how, when and whether you can kind of 
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dictate states on their authorization schemes and their 

approaches. I'm just kind of interested in that in 

general. What you think?

MR. MARTIN: I don't know. I would 

say, in response to that, that first of all, these are 

these questions here are just to get a feel for the 

committee of where, you know, where we stand on that. We 

haven't sort of proposed anything with respect to this. 

It's not the Department's intent to dictate. I think the 

state's- you know, what their procedures are. We are 

concerned about the exemptions that exist and, you know, 

and I think that that's- you can see from this- thesewhat's proposed here and then what's been asked here that 

that is a legitimate concern on our part whether or not 

these exemptions which are currently are in our 

regulation, whether they should be retained or not. So I 

think that's where we're going with this. But, I mean, 

Denise might want to- if she does, I think want to 

expound a little bit. I will turn it over to her.

MS. MORELLI: I think you're getting 

into an idea of like, what role does the Federal 

Government have in the state's rights here? But 

remembering this is a Federal program and it's a 

voluntary program. Institutions don't have to 

participate. And so we are- you know, have the authority 
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to monitor who comes into the program and what they do 

while they're in the program. So I think that's the 

concept here. And we want to make sure that the oversight 

and the triad that Congress set up is meaningful. And so 

that each, like Barmak keeps saying at each leg of the 

trio meets its responsibilities. So I think that's where 

our position is coming from here.

MR. ANDERSON: Thanks so much for 

that.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, Denise. On 

an administrative point, Michale's coming in for Jamie. 

And Michale, in fact, has his hand up. So, Michale, 

you're next. Go ahead.

MR. MCCOMIS: Thank you and good 

afternoon. As an institutional creditor, we accredit a 

number of institutions that do reside in states that 

applicable LBMA or licensure by means of accreditation 

rules on the books. I think Jillian's number four sounds 

pretty accurate, but there are, you know, 50 states and 

50 different ways of doing things, for sure. I think 

largely, you know, for us as an accreditor, we try to 

work with the states in whatever format and design that 

they have put forward. Licensure by means of 

accreditation, I think historically, when it was really 

being developed in the late 90s and early 2000, was 
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Program Integrity and 

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trying to cut through, in some ways, some duplicative 

work that maybe- where accreditors were asking for 

certain things. The states were asking for exactly the 

same kinds of things. And maybe it has achieved that and 

maybe it hasn't. I'm not really sure, but it does create, 

in some instances, a chicken and an egg instance where 

you have to be- you know, for accreditors, you have to 

have state authorization, state approval to say, offer a 

new program. But the state will say, no, you just get it 

approved by the, you know, by the accreditor. And so it 

does create, in some instances where we have to work very 

closely with those states. And it doesn't pose a 

particular difficulty, but it's just something that we 

tend to be very mindful about and wanting to make sure 

that we've got, you know, all those bases covered to make 

sure that if we're, you know, providing that we have the 

kind of state approval that we need. I do think that the 

questions that are being posed here are important ones. 

To Barmak's point about the three-legged stool, it's 

difficult when any leg of that stool and any circumstance 

is shorter or less secure than the other two. And it puts 

more pressure on the remaining elements of the triad. So, 

whereas I'm not- you know, I've been doing these 

negotiations for a long time. I've heard the same 

questions and arguments around Federalism and overreach. 
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But I do understand the issue of the Federal Government 

having an expectation of what eligibility for Federal 

Financial Aid means with regard to state authorization. 

And so to the extent that they can strengthen that triad, 

I think that's in the best interest of students and 

finding ways to make sure if LBMA allowances do continue 

to exist, that maybe there are just some parameters or 

some frameworks around it. Thank you. 

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you. Michale. 

Anything else on those questions that the Department is 

seeking clarity on? Alright. 

DR. PRINCE: Are we still on question 

one, or are we on question one, two, and three?

MR. WEATHERS: We're addressing them 

all holistically. 

DR. PRINCE: Oh, sorry, I didn't 

understand. Okay, so I raise my handMR. WEATHERS: Go ahead, DC.

DR. PRINCE: Get in the queue. Yeah, 

to this question, I think we are- I think we're at a 

pivotal time in point in, I think, in our experience of 

this triad. And as I've talked to other people over the 

break about this, whether or not it is time for an 

overhaul of this triad and what we have set in stone for 

so many years. And I think what we- what it sounds like 
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in these discussions, and what I've heard from others, is 

that we are- we're nitpicking at particular pieces of 

things, but we're not looking at the entire holistic 

picture of what the triad is. Now, clearly some of that 

will require Act of Congress, which good luck on that. 

But I think from the standpoint of here, it sounds like 

there are- and I know I had made this comment earlier, 

Greg, you said the Department is not interested in 

shifting responsibilities between states and accreditors, 

and I think that might be a bit shortsighted as I've 

talked to other communities in the sense that we might 

need to. We might need to empower states to do more, just 

for example, moving some responsibilities from 

accreditors to states, and giving states more authority 

and right to do what we need them to do rather than 

giving it to an accreditor. Understanding our culture and 

political environment right now, I think we it would be 

in the best interest to give that to states. But at the 

same time, too, I also think that we should remove in 

many ways, the number of years and institutions should 

receive an exemption or realign what that exemption 

means. Institutions already have to reapply for several 

different things at the moment to stay afloat whether 

it's a state, whether it's accreditor, whatever the case 

may be. And so to do a blanket exemption, almost what it 
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sounds, though, from others is just this- you get this 

blanket exemption without reapplication or reapplying or 

in many instances, you're just free to go. Seems a bit as 

if it's almost the wild, wild West. And so I think this 

is why a number of people that I've spoken with have 

asked for an overhaul, because we've just allowed things 

to continue on, assuming that when it was first 

initiated, when it was first done still is applicable. 

And what's going on in our sector in higher education 

might push us rather than us have these discussions push 

us to rethink this regulatory trap, particularly for 

states to take on a greater responsibility of managing 

their institutions within their own states as well. But I 

think finally, what I'm also getting back from other 

constituencies is around risk based-analysis of 

institutions and the [30 seconds] risk-based analysis 

institutions as well as on public and private, and how we 

shared information to states in order to control and be 

able to effectively plan and improve those institutions, 

whether they're online, public, private, mortar, brick 

and mortar, online to be able to do that. So I think 

there's some reports out there that are speaking to an 

overhaul in how we need to better think about moving 

responsibility between the different triads.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, DC. Alright, 
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Program Integrity and 

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moving on. Carolyn?

MS. FAST: Just a quick note that we 

share the concerns about these problems potentially from 

states that permit exemptions for state authorizations 

and other consumer protection requirements based on how 

long a school has been in operation or based on 

accreditation. There have been examples of schools that 

have met the years of operation requirement, possibly 

after changing, you know, several changes of ownership as 

I think Robyn was mentioning earlier that have for 

example, closed, abruptly leaving their students with 

really a lot of problems. And those are the kinds of 

things that we are concerned about with these exemptions. 

And one of the discussion questions is, what should the 

Department be requiring from states in terms of 

authorization? And one thing, among others, might be to 

repeatedly look at the school's financial stability and 

make sure that if there is a problem, they have something 

in place, such as a teach out agreement to address this 

concern or protections for students affected by closures. 

These are things that could be part of state requirements 

for state authorization.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, Carolyn. 

Barmak? 

MR. NASSIRIAN: Two quick points. But 
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Program Integrity and 

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DC, I share your frustration, that sometimes it feels 

like we're rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic 

instead of changing course in a strategic and effective 

way. Sadly, we are operating within the confines of a 

statute that is quite old and has not been updated and 

may, for all I know, never, ever again get updated. So 

we'll see how things go there. But I think the goal is to 

move to the extent that we can to move the entire 

ecosystem in a better direction to the extent that that 

is possible, through regulation. So we will, in fact, 

offer redlines to attempt to do that. And I would 

certainly welcome whatever anybody else wants to propose 

that that could maybe move us towards a better 

arrangement all around. So that's one issue. The second 

issue I wanted to point out is that state- and this has 

been- I forget who it was who raised this, but it's an 

important point. State authorization has two kinds of 

meanings. One of them is the creative act of the state 

declaring that an entity is a learning venue when it's an 

institution of some kind of postsecondary education. I 

could live with exemptions on that front in cases where 

the institution predates the Republic or is in a state 

constitution, so that there is no ambiguity that it is by 

an a priori act, recognized to be an institution of 

higher learning. But state authorization also means 
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continuing terms and conditions that will apply based on 

the conduct and behavior of the institution, and no 

institution should be exempt from that. Again, we will 

offer some red line language on that front, but I think 

we need to be cognizant of the fact that we can't really 

force the state of California to put the UC system 

through a process when the UC system is in the 

constitution of the state of California. So we want to be 

respectful of those creative acts that declare an entity 

to be an institution. But we also want to make sure that, 

you know, bad actors can't hide behind antiquity as the 

reason why they should continue to engage in questionable 

behavior. Thank you.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you sir. Michale, 

you're next.

MR. MCCOMIS: Yeah, I was just going 

to add, I think, maybe aligning a bit with what Carolyn 

had said. It may be useful that, you know, while there 

may be some allowance that, you know, such, agreements or 

exemptions may exist that there are certain things that 

states can't hand off. And complaints obviously is one of 

them. But we can discuss, you know, what other ones 

really matter, particularly when it comes to student 

protections and the role that the states play in that 

particular regard. So maybe still trying to achieve some 
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of the, reduction in duplicity, or duplicative work, but 

at the same time retaining expectations from the Federal 

Government and the Department about, you know, what are 

the things that, as participants in Federal Financial Aid 

and consumer protection are most important to, you know, 

make sure that those continue to have a trifocal kind of 

oversight. Thank you. And Jamie's going to jump back in 

now.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you. Michale. 

Jesse, I show you next. And, just as a point of 

clarification, it seems like the system is sometimes 

showing different people in different orders, so I 

apologize if I'm getting the order wrong. Jesse, you're 

next.

MS. MORALES: Just wanted to throw out 

kind of building off of what others have said. And also, 

just in response to the question three of what factors 

the Department should consider as necessary for a state 

authorization. We had sent around some draft language a 

little earlier, and I think everybody received that. And 

so as part of that, go ahead- going ahead and 

considering, essentially risk-based review in terms of 

when we're considering state authorization, I think would 

be really helpful. And I- if- I don't know if you could 

pull up the language because I know if I try, that will 
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Program Integrity and 

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go horribly wrong. And if you can, scroll down. So this 

was just some of the language that we had proposed 

essentially. This would act as a trigger. Once 

institution has been flagged, state authorization will 

then know to specifically focus and review that, that 

institution or that program. And this is just kind of 

simplifying the language and simplifying the process for 

states. And so just wanted to note that in response.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, Jesse. 

Scott, I've got you next. 

MR. DOLAN: Yes, hi. Just want to 

follow up a little bit on the triad conversation that 

we've been having, in particular around the state's role 

as it- especially for authorization of institutions. And 

it feels like a lot of what we're discussing is, how much 

oversight they should have of specific institutions. And 

there's a bit of a concern, I think, in terms of who gets 

to decide those sorts of things. Is it the state who gets 

to decide the oversight within its boundaries, or is it 

the Federal Government that does so? And it feels like 

maybe we're conflating oversight and authorization, which 

are potentially two different things. And maybe I'm 

confused there, but would like a bit more discussion on 

that, or at least some time to really research that in 

more depth as we move forward as part of these 
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Program Integrity and 

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conversations so we can really have a good conversation 

about the role that the Federal Government plays, the 

role that accreditors play. I heard earlier a concern 

about institutional closure. We know for sure that those 

things are already under different regulations relative 

to the DOE as well as accreditors. So, it seems like a 

much larger conversation that we're having here around 

the role of the Federal Government, the role of states, 

and the role of accreditors as part of this triad. And I 

just want to make sure we're not confusing oversight 

within state boundaries with authorization to operate 

within a state.

MR. WEATHERS: Thanks, Scott. Next I 

have Jo. Go ahead, Jo. 

MS. BLONDIN: Yeah. Just a short 

comment about what Scott said. That's exactly what I was 

thinking as well, especially in terms of centralized 

states where I've been like Arkansas and very 

decentralized states, like where I am now in Ohio. So I 

appreciate your comment. Thank you.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, Jo. Next I 

have Robyn. Go ahead, Robyn.

MS. R. SMITH: Hi. Sure. I just want 

to go back to Jesse's proposal. Her proposal is to review 

and appropriately- to require states as part of their 
35

Program Integrity and 

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state authorization process, to review and appropriately 

act on actions concerning the institution by another 

regulator. This is something that's already acquiredrequired by accreditors, and it seems like it would be 

something that would be good to require of states as 

well. Of course, states would have the discretion to 

decide how they could do that. They could do it as part 

of their reauthorization process, re-approval process, 

whatever they provide for in-state law. The other point I 

want to make, and I assume this is what Barmak is going 

to say, too, but, the Higher Education Act provides for 

the taxpayer money for billions and billions of dollars 

in Federal Financial Aid every year. And the whole 

purpose of the state authorization reg and the discussion 

we're having is not to infringe on states' rights. It's 

to ensure that states in their Federally appointed role, 

are appropriately protecting students and ensuring that 

they get a good education. Again, states don't have to do 

this. Schools don't have to create Federal funding. But I 

think Federal Law is clear that if there is Federal money 

that is going out, the Federal Government has the right 

to enact what it sees as important parameters to gatekeep 

and protect the Federal money and make sure that it's 

being appropriately used.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, Robyn. 
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Program Integrity and 

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Barmak.

MR. NASSIRIAN: Just attempting to 

respond in a convincing way to Scott's concerns. The 

states are at liberty to authorize anybody they want to 

authorize for their own purposes, and they are at liberty 

to recognize through some sort of state comity, state 

agreement, just by whatever means each other's 

endorsement of their respective institutions. That's a 

state matter. When such institutions seek to access 

Federal funding, however, the Federal Government gets to 

weigh in and define the kinds of state authorization that 

it views as conforming with the enabling statute in Title 

IV. Now, private institutions, public institutions, 

vocational institutions are all subject to this within 

the geographic limits of the state in which they're 

located. There's nothing new here. They all have to 

comply with not only the creative act of being 

authorized, but by the continuing oversight that that may 

or may not be accompanied with in their own state. The 

question we're pondering here is whether, having been 

authorized by one state, state A, you can then reach out 

and touch hundreds, thousands of students in other 

states, via distance. And the general consensus of I 

think the community has been that you are delivering 

education into the state in which the student was 
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Program Integrity and 

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initially located when they enrolled. So that is the 

same. The fact that you're offering it via distance is 

almost- is identical, for our purposes, to having leased 

a building in state B and having thus subjected yourself 

to the jurisdiction of state B. The Department is 

attempting to accommodate institutional concerns about 

compliance burdens by allowing reciprocity, certain types 

of state reciprocity to satisfy that requirement. So 

there really shouldn't be any technical confusion here. 

This is just as you would be subject to the jurisdiction 

of a state if you went there to set up shop. You are 

setting up shop on the internet, and the Department is 

actually leniently attempting to accommodate your, you 

know, institutional compliance burden concerns by 

contemplating the kinds of reciprocity arrangements that 

satisfy the needs of the AG. I hope that's helpful. I 

don't know if it is, but my best [inaudible].

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you. Jamie, I 

have you next. Go ahead.

MS. STUDLEY: Thank you. I'm going to 

come back to- and I really appreciate the Department 

opening these questions. We're all united and wanting to 

have a higher education universe of institutions that 

meet reasonable, responsive, responsible standards. And 

it's in nobody's interest to duplicate effort. We- 
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Program Integrity and 

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certainly our states do not have unlimited resources. And 

if they make the decision that the process that an 

institution has gone through provides them with 

information that they need toward their satisfaction of 

their part of the triad responsibilities, I think we 

should allow them to do that, recognizing that there is 

also the Federal recognition of the accrediting agency. 

And those three pieces might come together to provide 

some efficiency so that we can each do the specialized 

jobs that we have to do. I think Michale made a good 

point about realizing that if we were doing something 

that the state wanted to know about in a form that they 

could- that they could understand from an accreditor that 

they should be entitled to use that information. And 

perhaps the word exemption is something that deserves a 

look, because I think exemption makes people- it creates 

an opportunity to say, what is the scope of the act that 

the state is taking when it accepts a determination by 

another entity? And, as an example, you know, Carolyn 

referred to some states may want to look at financial 

results, accreditors that I know are looking at financial 

performance by institutions, many of us every year. So 

the state should be looking at whether what it wants to 

know is actually carried out by somebody else, and 

whether they can get what they need in an efficient way, 
39

Program Integrity and 

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so that they can then use their resources to do things 

that only the state has the authority or the expertise to 

do. Let me speak really briefly to Jesse's comment. I 

just got it so I don't have a thought overall about the 

merits, but as you look at it, I would like to suggest, 

Jesse, that you think about whether the word review 

belongs there, because accreditors carry out lots and 

lots of reviews that are in the ordinary course. And it 

would be excessive for- to expect states to track every 

one of the special visits or additional requests for 

information that an accreditor does, even if a 

determination were made that they should take more 

explicit cognizance of sanctions, withdrawals, [30 

seconds] significant decisions that signal failure to 

meet standards.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, Jamie. Next 

we have John. Go ahead, John.

MR. WARE: Yeah. Thanks. Getting back 

to the question about what types of things should 

institutions probably not be exempt from? And one issue 

that came up during reciprocity discussions and is always 

a concern is closure, school closures. When schools are

exempt from regulations, a lot of times they may be 

exempt from eligibility for tuition recovery funds, 

bonds, you know, other processes, records, storage and 
40

Program Integrity and 

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management that may apply to other non-exempted 

institutions. So, you know, from a state regulatory 

perspective, I think, you know, one of our concerns is if 

a student's attending an online school out of state and 

that school closes, you know, we want to be assured that 

that student is not going to be, you know, not eligible 

for, what? You know, the- like I said, bonds and tuition 

recovery funds that other similarly situated students 

would be eligible for. So I don't think this is an issue, 

again, for, state institutions. But in many states, 

private, particularly private, not for-profit 

institutions are covered by these type of closure 

regulations. So I would hope that, if, you know, when 

we're talking about what things shouldn't people be 

exempt from, I think those type of closure regulations 

would definitely be something that institutions should 

not be exempt from.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, John. 

Alright. Robyn.

MS. R. SMITH: Thank you. I think I 

just want to clarify the discussion a little. I think 

we're throwing around two concepts that we need to be 

very clear about. One concept is exemption. That is where 

the state determines that it is not going to oversee a 

school at all based on accreditation or time in 
41

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operation. That means those schools under an exemption 

are not subject to any of the consumer protections. They 

don't have to pay into student tuition recovery fund, 

that they don't have to comply with a refund law or a 

cancellation law. They don't have to provide certain 

disclosures. They're exempt. That's where a state has 

basically forfeited its state oversight protection role 

in favor of the accreditor. The second kind of situation, 

which I think Jamie's referring to, is where a state 

determines that it's going to approve a school based on 

its accreditation, and it's not going to require the 

school to go through a whole separate authorization 

process to demonstrate it meets the minimum state 

standards. That, of course, is debatable whether that's 

wise to do. But in that circumstance, the school is still 

subject to the consumer protections, meaning they still 

have to pay into the state tuition recovery fund. They 

still have to comply with the false advertising 

provisions of the state higher Education Consumer Code. 

So I think we need to be very clear about what the 

difference is that we're discussing here. Thanks.

MR. WEATHERS: Thank you, Robyn. And 

if we have nothing else, we are close to when we'd be 

naturally taking a break. I'll defer to you, Greg.

MR. MARTIN: Yeah, I think that's- 
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Program Integrity and 

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this is a good time to take a break, and then we can come 

back with a discussion on distance education.

MR. WEATHERS: Jamie had one quick 

thing she wants to add, and then we're going to go to a 

break. Go ahead, Jamie.

MS. STUDLEY: You may want to discuss 

it another time, but buried in the text and not under the 

questions for discussion was the Department is interested 

in feedback on improving compliance and complaint 

reporting. It was unclear whether that was the 

Department's reporting on complaints that it knows about, 

because it referred to reporting to NC-SARA or a similar 

entity, the Department, the state or the accreditor. And 

I'm fine- I'm not trying to say you need to do it now, 

but you may want to think about whether there are a set 

of questions there that you'd like comment on at some 

point in the next three months.

MR. MARTIN: Thank you.

MR. WEATHERS: [Inaudible] Jamie. What 

time did we want to come back, Greg?

MR. MARTIN: I believe ten minutes 

would be appropriate.

MR. WEATHERS: Ten minutes. So let's 

call it ten after two Eastern Standard Time. We'll see 

you then. And, we can sign off. Thank you.
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Program Integrity and 

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MR. MARTIN: Thank you.

MR. ROBERTS: Alright. Good afternoon 

everyone. Welcome back from that short break. My name is 

Brady Roberts. I'll be facilitating this afternoon issue 

paper number three, Distance Education, as well as our 

public comment period, which is set to begin promptly at 

3:30. And I'll remind folks who have a speaking slot, to 

log on about 15 minutes ahead of their assigned time. 

And, Greg, I'll turn it right over to you. I know you 

wanted to tee up the issue paper as well as begin walking 

the committee through the content of the document. Muted.

MR. MUSSER: You're muted, Greg.

MR. MARTIN: I muted myself yet again, 

which is- I'm competing with Denise to see who can mute 

themselves more frequently during this- these 

proceedings. So thank you. And welcome back everybody. 

And as Brady indicated, we'll be taking up issue paper 

three. And, when we started on Monday, I discussed with 

all of you that, I was sharing responsibility for 

reviewing these papers and negotiating with my colleague 

David Musser. He is here now. And David will be taking up 

the discussion on issue paper three. So I'll ask David to 

reintroduce himself, and then he will begin with that 

discussion. Thank you, David.

MR. MUSSER: No problem, Greg, and 
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Program Integrity and 

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thanks, all of you. My name is David Musser. As Greg just 

said, I work for the Office of Federal Student Aid at the 

Department. I've been there for about 13 years. And I'm 

the deputy director for policy implementation and 

oversight, where we do a lot of work, doing our best to 

implement all of the fun and interesting rules that come 

from OPE and Congress, and others. So I've been working 

on distance education and return of Title IV issues for 

many years, and I, quite frankly, am looking forward to 

talking with you guys about it. So if we could bring up 

the issue paper on the screen for everybody to see. 

Awesome. Thank you. So today we want to talk about two 

separate issues related to distance education. It's 

appropriate that we're moving into this topic after 

working on state authorization for distance education for 

the last hours. And the two different topics are virtual 

locations and asynchronous learning and distance 

education. So if it's okay with you guys, I would like to 

take each of those topics separately, and we'll talk 

about the first one and then move into the- to the other 

one after we finished that discussion. So let's start 

with virtual locations. So as you all know, distance 

education is a modality that, has become quite popular 

for postsecondary education in the United States and 

elsewhere. The Department has very limited data on- the 
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Program Integrity and 

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issue paper says students enrolled in distance education. 

And that's not exactly right. We do collect information 

about distance education broadly in our iPad survey 

annually. But that survey looks at number one, all 

distance education at the institution. It looks at it at 

a program and institutional level. And it doesn't look at 

it from the perspective of which individuals receive 

Title IV Aid. So currently the Department does not have 

any of that information. And the reason for that is we, 

way back when distance education was passed into law as a 

method of offering postsecondary education that was not 

going to be subject to the very strict limitations on 

correspondence courses, that was back in 2006, the 

Department always had schools report enrollment data 

using the eight-digit Office of Postsecondary Education 

ID number. And that number, the six-digit number isessentially reflects a whole institution. And then 

there's a two-digit suffix at the end of it that tells 

the Department about specific locations that the school 

offers. So for many years, schools have reported who is 

enrolled in- at their institution and receiving Title IV 

Aid at the eight-digit level. So we know the specific 

locations where students are enrolled across the country. 

So if an institution has physical locations in all 50 

states, then it's expected to report in NSLDS, the 
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Program Integrity and 

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students- where the student is studying in all- in each 

of those states. This is important for a variety of 

reasons. But one of those reasons is for closed school 

discharge purposes. Closed school discharges, as you guys 

all know, are obviously something that the Department and 

all the entities that oversee higher education want to 

avoid. But when they happen, we want to know the scope of 

who was affected, how many students, the amount of aid 

involved, and as much as we can possibly know about the 

situation. So we already know who- if a student is 

enrolled in a physical location where they are and 

essentially everything that we need about that 

individual. However, for distance education, when that 

became popular, the Department, didn't have a good way of 

identifying which individuals were enrolled in distance 

ed. And we didn't create any changes to our systems. So 

institutions have been asked to report students who are 

enrolled in distance education, as if they are enrolled 

at the main campus of the institution. And that means 

that we can't distinguish between students who are 

enrolled in distance education programs and those who are 

enrolled in other programs at the same institution, at 

least in terms of the individuals who are receiving Title 

IV Aid. So the other issue that this brings up is that 

we're also not able to distinguish between the two types 
47

Program Integrity and 

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of students with respect to the- all the other 

information that we have about our Title IV recipients, 

including in the College Scorecard, which includes, 

program-level data about student debt, earnings 

completion, etc. That provides a lot of good information 

not just to the Department, but to policymakers and 

students and their families, if they know enough to go to 

that site and learn more about those programs. So for all 

those reasons- we can scroll down now- the Department is 

proposing today to create what- a concept of a virtual 

additional location for institutions that includes all 

students who are being instructed primarily through 

distance education. So this will allow the Department to 

distinguish between the two types of students. Students 

who are enrolled primarily in physical locations and 

students who are enrolled online. Scroll down a little 

bit more. It'll also- it also has the crucial effect of 

allowing the Department to treat the institution's 

offering of distance education the same way that we would 

as a physical additional location for closed school 

purposes. So currently, if all of the- if the- if an 

institution ends all of its instruction at a physical 

additional location, that's a closed school and students 

have certain rights for closed school discharges under 

certain circumstances. There are also a lot of other 
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Program Integrity and 

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things that go into closed school processes that the 

Department is aware of. It also ends up triggering a 

number of other responses throughout our oversight 

process. This would essentially treat an institution's 

ending of its offering of distance education like a 

closed school. And we believe that's appropriate since 

the two things have many things in common. If a student 

is enrolled in distance education, they obviously have 

the ability to enroll in other distance education 

programs at the same institution if their program ends. 

But if the institution ends all of its distance 

education, then they have no other opportunities to 

continue their study at that institution. Thus, we 

believe it's appropriate to treat that student as if that 

location, quote unquote, has closed. So if we could then 

scroll down to the regulatory text itself, what we're 

actually proposing here. So this is in 34 CFR 600.2 out 

of the definitions section. And it's under the definition 

of additional location. You can see here that currently 

there's a definition referring to a physical facility 

that is geographically separate from the main campus. And 

what we're proposing at the bottom in a new three, is a 

virtual location through which the institution offers 

100% of an educational program through distance education 

or correspondence courses, notwithstanding requirements 
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for students to complete on-campus or residential periods 

of 90 days or less. And that last piece is intended to 

address the fact that there are a number of programs that 

are or they- that are offered in the vast majority 

through distance education, but that require relatively 

short periods of on-campus engagement, either at the 

beginning or at the end of program. We wanted to ensure 

that schools didn't attempt to game these requirements by 

creating very short like maybe 2 or 3-day periods where 

students would be on campus. And we also wanted to 

acknowledge that those programs that have those short 

residential periods are being offered primarily online 

and are more akin to 100% distance education programs. So 

I'll stop there and we can take questions and comments 

from the group.

MR. ROBERTS: Alright. I see Barmak's 

hand first. Go ahead, Barmak.

MR. WEATHERS: Well, Dave, I think the 

proposal is quite reasonable, but I have a question with 

the phraseology of 100- the institution offers 100% of 

the program. I suspect what you have in mind is an 

entirely online program. But we have the vexing problem 

of bifurcation of programs, online programs, that may be 

offered by the institution or may be essentially marketed 

by the institution, but in fact offered and hosted by a 
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commercial third- ineligible third party. The rationale 

that you offered for seeking to separate these students, 

specifically the closed school rationale, applies a 

fortiori to that group. It is much more likely, given the 

finances of some of the- some of said third party OPMs 

that we may see a collapse of an OPM leaving a subset of 

online students at an institution holding the bag. So it 

seems to me like some thoughts should be given to 

distinguish and requiring institutions to distinguish 

their reporting of online enrollments. I support the 

notion of creating a separate location, but it would be 

good to know which- what component of enrollments at said 

location are being educated by the institution, using its 

own faculty and its own curriculum and its own processes. 

And what component of those enrollments may be handed off 

to a third party who's at much greater risk of closing 

the program going under, etc., etc. So that's that. I 

don't know whether the best way is to create two separate 

locations or to somehow bifurcate that location into two 

distinct categories, but that would be a suggestion that 

I would make. Thank you.

MR. ROBERTS: Thanks, Barmak. Robyn, I 

have your hand next.

MS. R. SMITH: Sure. Hi. I strongly 

support this proposal because of the students that we 
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see. We see students whose schools have closed and two 

circumstances where they are not eligible for closed 

school discharge because of the way that the physical 

location is associated with on- an online program. We see 

one- in some cases, the physical campus closes and stops, 

discontinues programs before students can complete while 

there's an online program continuing, they are not 

eligible for a closed school discharge. Similarly, we 

have had cases where the online programs have been 

discontinued before a student can complete, but they canthey're affiliated with a physical campus, and the 

student cannot then get a discharge. So I think this 

proposal will go a long way to rectify that situation and 

ensure that students whose programs are- whose schools 

actually do close are able to get a closed school 

discharge.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you, Robyn. 

Jillian, please.

MS. KLEIN: Yeah, thanks. Dave, can 

you talk about how an institution would handle a program, 

for example, where a student is making a different 

choice, sort of from term to term, about if they're going 

to take a class on ground or if they're going to enroll 

in an online version of the same class?

MR. MUSSER: Sure. So in a situation 
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where a program is expected to be offered in multiple 

kinds of modalities, it would be assigned to the physical 

location, not to the online location. In cases where thethere is an option to take a large portion of the program 

online. Again, it would be assigned to the physical 

location. The intent here is to only apply this in cases 

where the only option is to take the program fully 

online. The- we are trying to distinguish between 

students who are enrolled on- at the physical campus and 

who happen to be taking online courses here or there. And 

they may transfer into the fully online version of the 

program. And in that case, you would put them in the 

virtual location. But the idea is that this is only going 

to reflect fully online programs that can be completed 

entirely online.

MS. KLEIN: So, just a couple things. 

One, I- and I mean, I know I'm not going to say anything 

you don't already know, but I don't think what you're 

describing is reflexive of how a lot of online programs 

operate now sort of post-Covid, which I think, you know, 

during the pandemic, I think a lot of institutions had 

already hadn't been offering online programs, made the 

choice to offer maybe the entirety of their program in an 

online format and allow students to sort of decide, this 

term I want to take one class online, but I'm going to 
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take the rest on ground, or students might enroll 

thinking they're going to take all their classes on 

ground, but then decide, actually, I really like taking 

them online. And so they're going to make a decision 

after they've already enrolled to actually take all the 

online version, all the online courses in that program, 

even though that maybe wasn't their intention when they 

applied. And I would say this is especially- this happens 

especially with adult students who I think once- they 

need to get into their program before they make a 

determination about how they're going be able to fit the 

flexibility component into their life. And so I'm just 

not sure. I just am having really a hard time thinking 

about my institution specifically, but just in general 

about adult students understanding how this is going to 

feasibly work. I mean, I think if the idea is like 

reporting after the fact backwards, that a student took 

all their classes in an online format, once you look back 

after they graduate, I guess we could do that, but I'm 

not sure how on an ongoing basis from an enrollment 

perspective, institutions are going to be able to do that 

in a way that's helpful. And I should have started my 

comments by saying I am 1,000% in favor of the Department 

getting more granular data on the outcomes related to 

online students. So I think if we can like, tag something 
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in NSLDS or do something else sort of on an ongoing basis 

that says this student took an online class or this 

student took an on ground class, I'm 100% in favor of 

that, and I would love to figure out a way to do that, 

even outside of it having to go through negotiated 

rulemaking. But I'm worried about this, both from the 

perspective of, like, I just don't know how it's going to 

be feasible for institutions given the realities of 

especially adult students. And also, I would love to see 

this at more of a student level than a program level. And 

I feel like this proposal does not get at that. Like, I 

feel like there's going to be a large population of 

students that are choosing to take online classes at some 

point where it's going to be really interesting for you 

and for policymakers in general, to see how students are 

performing in online versions of classes. And I don't 

think this proposal will get at that. And I'm sure I'm 

out of time, so I'll hop back in after everybody else. 

But just an overarching comment. Thanks.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you. I see Dave 

and Denise both have your hands up. I don't know who 

wants to respond first, but feel free. 

MR. MUSSER: Denise can go first.

MS. MORELLI: Well, you probably were 

going to answer this, but I think the focus of this 
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provision for us, Jillian, was programs that are 

entirely- we have a lot of- a lot of programs, a lot of 

schools that operate entirely online. And the focus was 

not on students who might be at the University of 

Maryland for- you know, on ground and then decide to go 

to global campus for a class or two. I don't know if 

that's even a possibility, but I- but this wasn't 

supposed to be about a class per class thing. It's 

supposed to be entire programs that are offered online. 

So the focus was more programmatic and not on an 

individual student taking some classes online and some- 

[interposing]

MS. KLEIN: With all due respect, 

like, why not? I mean, wouldn't we want to have that 

data? 

MS. MORELLI: But I'm not sure thathow- I guess getting to back to what you were saying 

before, I'm not sure how we would do that and it's not as 

big of an issue, I think, for the closed school discharge 

issue, which was one of our fundamental reasons for

moving to this. Plus, you know, the reporting that Dave 

said. But one of the big issues that we've run into is 

the same as I think what Robyn was talking about is the 

students that were taking classes on ground that closed 

that- you know, the on ground campus closes, and then 
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they're forced to be told that they have to go on 

distance ed or vice versa. So I think for the discharge 

purposes, it would be much harder for us to focus on that 

if we were talking student-specific classes. That's just 

the parameters from what the- where the proposal- 

[interposing]

MS. KLEIN: Yeah, I just think there's 

such an opportunity to get good data here. And I feel 

like you guys are missing a great opportunity.

MR. ROBERTS: Dave, did you want to 

add anything?

MR. MUSSER: Yeah, just a couple of 

other things. Well, you know, Jillian, we could just ask 

you to do both. So, but let's step back for a second 

about this current proposal. Yeah, I think one of the 

biggest things really is the closed school discharge 

component, which is not possible, in any other, at least 

from- in our opinion, legally. It has to be a location in 

order for us to tie it to the closed school discharge 

requirements. And I guess the one other thing I want to 

point out is that, in the Department's view, the 

distinction between students who are taking- which I 

definitely acknowledge, Jillian, is the most common 

situation, students who are taking a class here and there 

while also enrolled at the physical location and the 
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students who are enrolled entirely online, there's a 

bigger distinction between the two, in part due to the 

reliance on- the greater reliance on technology that's 

necessary at the institution for the fully distance 

education programs, and in terms of the way that the 

institution markets the program in different locations. 

There's a lot of things that are different for those 

individuals than for- we have- we would have a very 

difficult time parsing through all of the data if we 

tried to collect it, for example, in NSLDS at a student 

level. Are we looking for- are you taking one course 

through distance ed? Are you taking two courses? Are you 

half-time distance ed, half-time, physical location? We 

talked about that option over time. And we think that 

frankly might also be a reporting nightmare for schools. 

So this proposal is intended to strike a balance between 

getting the data that we all, I think, want about, 

distance education enrollment, with Title IV students, 

and some of the burden that we might impose on 

institutions for the amount of reporting that they have 

to do along with getting those closed school benefits.

MS. KLEIN: But just to be clear, in 

that closed school discharge scenario, it's only going to 

apply- so my institution could offer 200 programs online, 

but those students are only going to qualify for closed 
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school discharge if I stop offering all of those programs 

online, correct? Because it's not at a program level.

MR. MUSSER: That is correct.

MS. KLEIN: I just want to make sure 

we're speaking the same language.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you all. Carolyn, 

I see your hand is up next.

MS. FAST: Thanks. No, I, definitely 

support the Department making the move to address the 

closed school discharge problem, which this seems to do 

to at least some degree. And I'm also interested in some 

of the same issues that Jillian was raising about whether 

this really fixes the data problem. And so I apologize if 

you have covered this, but would this allow, students or 

others to be able to see the difference in outcomes 

between, for example, a program that's offered at a 

school both online, all online, and brick and mortar? So, 

for example, I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to go 

to take this program and I'm going to move to, you know, 

Maryland so I can take it in person, or I'm going to stay 

where I am in New York and take it online. And I want to 

know, are the outcomes better for the in-person? Is this 

going to help with that, or would the Department have to 

do something else?

MR. MUSSER: I believe it would. 
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There. I think you guys are raising an important point 

about the procedures that we'd have to use for how the 

schools report these students, but once we have 

established a virtual location, the school would then 

report that student in NSLDS for enrollment reporting 

purposes as enrolled at the virtual location. So we would 

know through that mechanism that they are distance ed. So 

that student is now being reported separately from the 

physical location student who's being reported at the 

physical location, OPEID where they're studying. So over 

time, we will start collecting information about students 

who are enrolled at both those physical locations and the 

distance education programs. And we would be able to 

distinguish between the two for all of purposes you 

described, learning about their debt, learning about 

their earnings later on in College Scorecard, etc.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you both. JoEllen, 

please.

MS. PRICE: Well, first of all, I 

agree with Jillian. I support collecting more data on 

these students. I think it's really important. But I'm 

trying to think of the logistics of how this would work. 

Right now, in order for us to get a location approved, we 

have to get approval from our accreditation agency, we 

have to get approval from our state agency to submit 
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those on our participation agreement for approval by the 

Department. Will we still be going through that process 

for this virtual location? And then my other question is, 

I work at a multi-location institution. I have for the 

last 17 years and we're a- one institution. We don't look 

at our separate locations as this person goes to this 

location, this person goes to this location. Our students 

are our students. And so they don't really register with 

a specific location. They could take one class at our 

south campus, one class at our north campus. So how would 

we distinguish in that example between a student going to 

our virtual location versus, you know, hopping from 

different locations in our brick and mortar? So, those 

are my two questions that I have, and I look forward to 

hearing from you.

MR. MUSSER: Good questions. So your 

first question, I think by and large, institutions have 

already undergone, if they're offering distance 

education, they've already undergone the process through 

their accrediting agency. And if there is one through 

their state that meets all the requirements to offer 

distance education, the Department wouldn't require an 

additional approval. And we would, I think, be very, 

careful to inform accrediting agencies that that's not an 

expectation. That's not what we're trying to do here. 
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What we're trying to do is really just distinguish 

between these categories of students. So we- the intent 

would be for you guys to rely on the same approvals that 

you've always had to offer distance education. And those 

would apply once when you're adding this location in the 

Department systems as well. So on the other question, I 

think in many cases, if you have a student who doesn't 

know which one- which, whether brick and mortar or online 

that they would want to take, in the majority of cases, 

we would probably advise you to report the student as a 

brick and mortar student. And only if the student 

switched over fully and said, I don't want to- I've moved 

back to Iowa, you know, and now I no longer want to live 

near the campus. You could then move him into the fully 

online version of the program knowing that they're now in 

a very different situation. But this question actually 

comes up with respect to physical locations all the time. 

Because especially at community colleges, many students 

hop around between physical locations. And currently the 

Department is a little bit flexible about how it lets 

schools make those determinations. I do think we might 

have to create some more specific procedures that we 

would give to institutions about what to do in different 

circumstances where a student is making a decision to 

transition between the two. But I do think that can be 
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accomplished in NSLDS enrollment reporting.

MR. ROBERTS: Okay, thank you both. 

John.

MR. WARE: Yes, thanks. And also 

reiterate, I think the collection of this data would be 

useful. We do collect some of it at the state level. And 

just as a side note, most of what we've seen as far as 

growth is in hybrid distance ed programs. But again, 

we're still getting a lot of fully online too. But just 

going back to the previous question, I would have a 

question too about where would they be, what state would 

they be authorized in as far as the virtual location 

goes? Because if a student had a complaint, where would 

that- you know, at the state level at least, where would 

that complaint go? So I think some thought needs to be 

given about how that virtual location would be domiciled 

for state authorization purposes. And, you know, whether 

states would have to separately approve that. Because 

there could be, you know, cases that, schools that 

operate in multiple states may have some distance ed 

programs approved in Ohio. They may have different 

distance ed programs approved in Texas. If they had to 

domicile them all under one virtual location, where would 

they- you know, what location would they emanate from, I 

guess from a state perspective?
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MR. MUSSER: So I think it would 

probably depend on state requirements in certain cases. 

But at least the way that we had envisioned this working, 

the virtual location would be domiciled in the state 

where the school's main campus is housed. And if the 

school- essentially, if the school meets that state's 

requirements to offer distance education, that's thethat would be the foundational approval that's needed in 

order to get this- the virtual location created. But then 

once it's created, you're then subject to- well, theyeah, the institution is then subject to all of the state 

requirements across the country, which is where our 

reciprocity comes in. And we're, you know, we're not 

looking at that essentially until the school starts 

operating in the other states. So I think if- you know, 

from the Department's perspective, when a school creates 

the virtual location, that's all we're really looking for 

at first is are you approved by your state, if that's 

required to offer distance education.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you, both. Scott.

MR. DOLAN: Yeah, thanks. Like others, 

I'm- we're fully supportive of the Department looking for 

better ways to get more and better data on students 

enrolled in distance education. And certainly the desire 

to answer questions about their outcomes. I have some 
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concerns maybe in terms of the proposed language that 

we're introducing, another definition of distance 

education when there already are a number of them that 

exist out there. You know, so I think trying to reconcile 

through this process, it seems like, to Jillian's point, 

there's an opportunity here maybe to better define 

distance education as part of the work that we're doing. 

And there's a real difference between offering and 

enrolling students in distance education programs. And if 

the interest is really being able to look at this at the 

student level, in addition to the institutional closure 

piece, I think we're missing that opportunity to kind of 

really look at the granular components of this by 

focusing only on the definition of offering distance ed. 

And I think the procedures that follow from this 

establishment of a virtual location, I think is really, 

really important, because of the logistics that would be 

involved for institutions in trying to track how to 

allocate students to these different components. So I 

think those are things, that, you know, are worth 

discussing as we move forward. 

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you, Scott. I do 

just want to note there have been a few questions in the 

chat and folks that do pose those if they necessitate any 

elaboration, feel free to raise your hand and you'll have 
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the floor. But Diana, we'll go to you next.

MS. HOOLEY: Thank you. We are also 

supportive of the Department's efforts here to collect 

more information. I think that that is absolutely the 

step- the right step forward. One question on this, I 

would have a recommendation, if that's possible, is, you 

know, we are seeing a rise in online education. We're 

seeing a rise in it being offered by third-partyMR. ROBERTS: Diana, I hate to 

interrupt. Your audio is coming in a little bit garbled, 

at least on my end. Looking at the room, it might be the 

case for some other folks as well.

MS. HOOLEY: Okay.

MR. ROBERTS: It's a little bit better 

now. It might just be the proximity that you are to your 

mic.

MS. HOOLEY: Yeah, that could be it. 

I'll move it a bit. Thanks. Okay. I'll start over for the 

sake of clarity. The- we're supportive of this- you know, 

attempt here by the Department to track- to create the 

virtual location for the purposes of the closed school 

discharge, as you say, and as well as for tracking 

outcomes. And I think to that point, I had a question 

and, and depending on the feasibility, we would recommend 

that the Department consider, whether it's possible to 
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also track, with these codes, which OPMs are providing 

the programs. Just with the proliferation of online 

learning and the number of it- of rise in the third 

parties that are offering these programs, it might be- we 

think it would be helpful to be able to track, again for 

the purposes of outcomes, to know which programs- you 

know, which third party providers are providing the 

programs. So I don't know if you're able to speak to 

whether that's data that you have, or that- or if thatif that's something that might be able to be tagged to 

these virtual locations.

MR. MUSSER: So I'll respond to the 

data question. We do not currently have comprehensive 

data about institutions and their use of online program 

management companies. We're looking into that right now. 

But it's not something that we have available. And 

regarding the idea of actually incorporating that 

concept, I think we can consider- we can take that back 

and consider it and think through whether there's anyanything that could be done as part of this proposal.

MR. ROBERTS: I want to welcome Magin 

to the table on behalf of civil rights and consumer 

organizations. But first we'll go to Robyn.

MS. R. SMITH: Yes. Hi. I like 

Jillian's idea too. I agree it would be very useful to 
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have more data on online students when they're not 

necessarily enrolled in a completely online college. I'm 

wondering, is there a reason the Department can askcannot ask schools to report whether a student is hybrid, 

all in-person, or all online?

MR. MUSSER: I would say there's no 

particular impediment to us asking that, in the law. And 

I would turn to Denise, to see if you can- if you have 

any idea of something that would prevent us from doing 

that.

MS. MORELLI: I did it again. I don't 

see any impediment legally for us doing that. It's just a 

matter of the procedure and how we would operationally 

accomplish it.

MR. MUSSER: So, I mean, I think we're 

open to that, and I think we're open to the suggestions 

that Jillian and others have brought up about different 

ways of getting this information. Obviously, we want to 

ensure that all of our- all of the Department's 

objectives are met here and that we don't impose too much 

burden on institutions at the same time. But this 

obviously is an important thing for the Department to 

obtain this information. So we're, you know, we're 

interested in those ideas.

MR. ROBERTS: Alright. Magin, please.
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MR. SANCHEZ: Thank you and I concur 

with a lot of thoughts so far of how important this data 

is in terms of tracking outcomes. I did have a questionclarification for the Department. I posted it in the 

chat. But in regards to- so for prison education 

programs, because they're already required to be reported 

as a separate location as a new location, for schools 

that offer PEP programs when [inaudible] the facility, 

some of them which are online only some of them are not 

where they have to report two different- would it be two 

different locations created, one for the brick and 

mortar?

MR. MUSSER: That's a good question. 

So the- you bring up the concept of reporting for 

students who are enrolled in prison education programs. 

And I didn't go through it, but that was the number two 

under the definition of it, of additional education, as 

you know. We require those individuals to be reported at 

the prison facility at which they're enrolled. And I 

think we would continue that practice for students who 

are enrolled in prison education programs. They would 

still be reported at the location, at the facility at 

which they're being incarcerated. But if you also had 

online programs that are being offered to individuals who 

are not incarcerated, you would then also have to have a 
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virtual location to accommodate those programs and 

students.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you, both. I just 

want to note that Zack is coming to the table on behalf 

of financial aid administrators, and Michale's coming to 

the table on behalf of accreditors. So Zack, we'll turn 

to you next.

MR. GOODWIN: Thank you, Brady. Since 

I'm kind of sensing from the group, and I agree with you, 

that there's a great value in having more granular data 

about who is studying online and to what extent, or 

whether they're in an online program that's fully online 

or just taking sort of a hybrid coursework plan, those 

sorts of things, it would seem to me, Dave, that the most 

logical place to do that would be via NSLDS enrollment 

reporting, simply because if we're capturing information 

on students based on not being in a 100% online program, 

because that would be a separate location, so you would 

know for sure what that student was doing, but just, hey, 

the student is full-time and one of their courses happens 

to be via distance education. If we're wanting to capture 

that kind of data, that could change honestly multiple 

times over the course of a payment period, just like any 

enrollment changes could happen and that would seem like 

the most logical place to put that. But I understand the 
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logistical challenge of making that happen.

MR. MUSSER: Yeah, I think as the- as 

you guys as negotiators think through options for 

collecting this in a different way, I would encourage you 

to think through, you know, how frequently schools would 

have to update that information, are you asking, and how 

granular would you want that information to be? Would you 

want schools to say the student's enrolled full-time, 

also enrolled half-time through distance ed. And then 

change that through the middle of the period? Do you want 

them to do that at the end of an academic year? Do you 

want them to do- and so again, we have talked about that 

NSLDS concept at length at the Department. And, you know, 

in most cases where it's an interesting concept, but it 

is going to get somewhat messy at institution- at the 

institution level, as they try to suss out, you know, 

which students are where, enrolled in which courses, etc. 

So, like I said, we are open to all of those ideas. But 

please think through all those kinds of things as we 

think through, you know, what options might be available 

to us.

MR. GOODWIN: Thank you, Dave.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you. And Michale, 

over to you next.

MR. MCCOMIS: Thank you. Dave, this is 
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kind of in the weeds and a crossover question, but do you 

anticipate that for the virtual location classification 

that accreditors would be required to adopt that 

designation as well under 602.24(f)?

MR. MUSSER: I'd have to take that 

back. We did not discuss that component of it. So I think 

I'd have to take that back and talk with the group about 

it. That's a good question.

MR. MCCOMIS: Yeah. Thank you. That 

would that would help me understand a little bit more 

about the scope of this. The last thing that I'll add 

just for the group. I shared it with a few folks, but the 

agency that I'm with, ACCSC, we do have a distance 

education facility classification. I don't know that all 

accreditors have one, but it was our attempt to try to 

get our arms around the 100% distance education program 

that may or may not be offered or administered through 

what we would otherwise classify as a main or a branch 

campus. So it gives us an opportunity to go in and still 

have something and some place to look at something. But 

it is a very, very difficult range of circumstance. Dave, 

as you just said, getting institutions to really try and 

track the multiple ways in which students are enrolled in 

these courses and programs is not an easy task, but, 

certainly starting with 100% distance education programs, 
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as Denise had mentioned, is a- is much more manageable.

MR. ROBERTS: Alright. JoEllen.

MS. PRICE: So my question is about 

the school gets a virtual location approved. Are there 

administrative capability implications in terms of 

staffing, in terms of ensuring that the school has met 

all the requirements of having another location? That's 

my first question. Then my second question, do you also 

foresee implications in terms of how we report the 

programs in which students obtain their degree? So I'll 

give you an example. My MBA was done 100% online. And at 

the same college my master's in IT was done 100% 

virtually. Looking at my transcript, I cannot distinguish 

the difference between the two. Would there be 

implications of schools having to make it clearer for 

students like on an academic transcript, on what program 

or how they received their degree program? Those are my 

questions.

MR. MUSSER: Good questions. And no, I 

guess the answer is no, I don't think so. The- even like 

I said today, you can have a program offered at multiple 

locations at the same institution. And in most of those 

cases, unless the institution views those locations as 

unique colleges, which sometimes they do and sometimes 

that affects, you know, what your degree says when you 
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graduate, we- you know, the Department certainly doesn't 

require anything of institutions regarding the- how they 

provide that information about the student's credential. 

So it could be that the state changes its mind once we 

change these rules and require schools to do something 

like this, but it would not be a Department requirement.

MR. ROBERTS: Denise?

MS. MORELLI: I think to answer your 

question about, like, administrative capability and other 

things, I think that a program review would look at or an 

auditor would look at. I don't think this adds anything 

to that. It's still- the regulations are the same, and 

that's the same thing. If we could go into one location 

of a multi-chain- you know, location- multi-location 

chain and one location has problems and other ones don't. 

So like we would be looking at the same requirements, all 

the same issues and regulations have to be met no matter 

whether it's a virtual or an on-ground location, 

especially except for the distance ed-specific 

requirements. So it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't 

add any more burden to the schools than already exists in 

complying with the regulations.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you. Jillian, I 

think I saw your hand raise and then lower. You're good? 

Okay.
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MS. KLEIN: I'm good. I'll put it in 

the chat. Thanks, Brady.

MR. ROBERTS: Okay. Appreciate it. 

Well, I'm glancing at the clock right now. I know that 

we're waiting another 30 minutes or so until folks have 

their scheduled public comment period. Is there anything 

else, Greg, that you wanted to pose to the committee, or 

solicit in terms of feedback or additional questions for 

consideration? 

MR. MUSSER: Well, we still have 

another topic on distance ed. 

MR. ROBERTS: Oh, I apologize.

MR. MARTIN: There's still an 

additional topic [interposing]

MR. ROBERTS: Yes. So then I'll turn 

it back over to you, Dave. I apologize for that.

MR. MUSSER: No problem at all. I 

think we can bring the issue paper back up, though. 

Alright. So- and Joe has it right where I wanted. We're 

going to turn to the second topic of distance education 

of the- related to asynchronous distance education at 

clock-hour programs. So before I get into the meat of 

this, I want to give a little bit of history about this 

issue. Again, back in 2006, distance education was first 

legally defined. And the law provides that it can be 
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offered both synchronously, meaning in a format where the 

students are learning in real-time with their instructor 

and asynchronously, meaning, the student is essentially 

learning on an online platform, and not at the same time 

as an instructor. So both are now quite common, and 

potentially, and you guys might be able to tell me more, 

more about this than I would know, asynchronous 

instruction has gained in popularity since that time as 

technology has improved. So between the period of 2006 

and the negotiated rulemaking process in 2019, there was 

a lot of confusion in the field about whether clock-hour 

programs could be offered using asynchronous distance 

education, i.e. students logging on to a system and 

engaging in coursework that way. In the 2019 negotiated 

rulemaking process, we finally did put some clarity to 

the issue. And at that time, the Department determined 

that the- clock-hour programs could be offered 

asynchronous- through asynchronous distance education 

with certain limitations. The schools had to ensure that 

they were able to monitor the student's active engagement 

in each of those clock hours for all the- for 50 out of 

60 minutes, which is how a clock-hour is defined for all 

other purposes. And they had to have enough technology to 

do that with some degree of certainty that the student 

was actually engaged in those activities, rather than, 
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for example, clicking a button and then walking away. 

Now, as you can imagine, this level of technical 

expertise and technology as well, is not easy to come by 

and it- I think a lot of institutions found it quite 

difficult to implement the Department's requirements. We 

looked at a number of institutions that had- that applied 

to offer programs generally partially through 

asynchronous distance education. Some of them had very 

sophisticated systems which logged keystrokes, logged 

every single activity that the student performed. The 

institutions indicated that that was very expensive, and 

there were very few that had that. And we saw a lot of 

institutions that had minimal, if any, technology and 

were in some cases having students scroll through 

PowerPoint presentations to gain those asynchronous clock 

hours. Then with the advent of Covid, many institutions 

with clock-hour programs shifted into an online format. 

And although the Department did offer a number of waivers 

of distance education requirements, it did not waive this 

one. And we found numerous, numerous instances of cases 

where institutions did not have technology that was up to 

the task in those regulatory requirements of actually 

monitoring student activity. So for that- that's part of 

the reason for our proposal, which I'll get to in a 

second. The other component of our thinking here is that 
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the original concept of a clock-hour as it goes back into 

the 60s, is an hour of instruction spent between students 

and instructors in a classroom. That's how clock-hour 

programs were carried out, until distance education even 

became available. And it's still how it's carried out in 

synchronous distance education programs. But one thing 

that the Department was very clear about for all those 

years is that homework, which is common in these programs 

where students are not actually working with their 

instructor, is not something that you can count for Title 

IV purposes. Now, the reason all of this is important for 

Title IV purposes is that completion of clock hours and 

many of you are not- probably not all that familiar with 

clock hours, completion of clock hours is required before 

a student can get subsequent disbursements of Title IV 

Aid. So you have to complete a certain number of clock 

hours before you can get your next Direct Loan, Pell 

Grant, etc. disbursements. So there is a built-in 

incentive for schools that want to ensure that students 

are getting as much aid as possible, to also make sure to 

get them as many hours as possible that are completed and 

ensure that they get to that next disbursement point. So 

because the concept of asynchronous distance education 

was so new, the Department was really grappling with what 

the distinction was between homework, you know, work that 
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you might do in terms of reading, in terms of, you know, 

watching videos online and actually being instructed by a 

human being in a classroom. And we have decided in this 

case that this in many ways blurs that distinction 

substantially, creating some real concerns for us, 

especially given the lack of technical expertise that 

we've seen throughout the community, that this is an area 

that potentially is [inaudible] for fraud, waste, and 

abuse. And therefore we are proposing to eliminate the

concept of asynchronous clock hours, at least as it 

pertains to earning Title IV or earning hours toward 

Title IV eligibility. Nothing in this proposal would 

prevent a clock-hour program from having a distance 

education component, or offering, you know, support, 

learning modules, etc. for students. However, this 

proposal would prevent the institution from counting any 

time that the student spends on that coursework 

asynchronously without an instructor present at- toward 

the hours the student has actually completed for Title IV 

purposes. And so to do that, we- it did two things in the 

regulations. And you can scroll down and show. First, in 

the definition of a clock hour, which is also in 34 CFR 

600.2, we removed all references to asynchronous 

coursework, or classes and retained the concept of 

synchronous classes, lectures, or recitation. And then we 
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also made changes in the definition of an academic year, 

which is under 668.3 to refer to only credit hour 

programs offered using asynchronous coursework and credit 

hour programs in both romanette 2 A and B here. So this 

is just an acknowledgment that students are also not 

earning weeks toward Title IV disbursement in clock-hour 

programs by completing distance education through 

asynchronous means. So I will stop there. And Denise 

looks like she has something to add before I go on.

MS. MORELLI: I just wanted to note 

that we did see quite a bit of abuse in their compliance 

work, which I do a lot of in this area with the clockhour schools, which are generally hands-on and students 

that we've interviewed had, you know, significant 

problems in the area not being trained the way they 

thought they were going to be trained. And so I think 

this was our ability to try to close that little- that 

loophole that's created some abuse in the arena.

MR. ROBERTS: Okay. Thank you. With 

that, I'll turn it over to the committee and we'll start 

with Barmak. Go ahead.

MR. NASSIRIAN: So we have also had 

complaints from student veterans. And the one that sort 

of rings in my ears is about one student vet who was 

complaining about the program he was enrolled in, being 
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worse than parking yourself in front of YouTube. That is 

fine. You can learn a lot from YouTube. There may be all 

kinds of instructional, passively delivered, asynchronous 

instructional content, but it's not a replacement for 

interactions with a qualified faculty. And my only other 

comment, in addition to pointing out that we strongly 

support the change, is to make sure that we don't end up 

with just a proxy for a qualified faculty member. It 

shouldn't just be anybody off the street sitting in. It 

should be a qualified faculty member engaged in 

substantive interactions with the students. That's what 

counts as a meaningful clock-hour, in my view.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you, Barmak. 

Carolyn, go ahead.

MS. FAST: I also just wanted to 

indicate that I strongly support this proposal, both for 

protecting students and protecting taxpayers from the 

kinds of things that Barmak was describing and the 

Department has described as problems.

MR. ROBERTS: Alright, thank you. 

Jillian, I see your hand next.

MS. KLEIN: Thanks. I just have a 

couple questions. Can you- Dave, I appreciate you saying 

that you got a bunch of proposals or something from 

institutions offering asynchronous clock-hour programs. 
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Can you- you know, obviously, don't tell me, like, the 

school, but I'm having a hard time envisioning what an 

asynchronous clock-hour program is just because I think 

of, like, cosmetology programs and welding and things. 

Can you just give a broad example just so we can all 

envision the same thing?

MR. MUSSER: Yeah, no problem. That's 

a great question. So let's actually use cosmetology as an 

example. A profession that most people think of as 

extremely hands-on and focused on something that you'rethat- on a variety of things that you're learning that 

require sort of physical interaction with other humans. 

In fact, one of the ones that we reviewed was a 

cosmetology program. And they were- the idea was they 

wanted to either allow or require, unfortunately, I don't 

remember which, students to take their- the coursework 

portion of the program online and give the students the 

flexibility to do that while then having them come in and 

do all of the actual clinical work- what we sometimes 

call clinical work, the hands-on work and training in 

person. So the- in the case that we looked at, the 

institution had- I'll give the example of the very 

sophisticated one, the system would first do start a 

video and then identify the individual. And then the 

student would work their way through the learning 
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modules, and they were structured in the same way that 

they would have been structured, had the student been 

sitting in a classroom listening to their instructor, and 

the system monitored this- essentially every place the 

student went, it monitored whether the student was 

answering questions in a timely way, that when they were 

quizzed, and then the student had to take a quiz at the 

end of each module in order to get credit for that 

particular skill that- or that piece of knowledge that 

they were expected to obtain through the program. So at 

the end of it, the system had a report that showed, you 

know, X logged in on this at this time, engaged in this 

module at this time. Here's their keystrokes. Here's 

their quiz. They finished the quiz with this score, etc. 

And the system would then take the amount of time that 

the student was actually engaged in that particular 

module, as opposed to just hunting around the site, and 

it would add those minutes toward the students as clock 

hours- completed clock hours for Title IV purposes, and 

if the student failed the quiz, then this- then the 

program would omit that hour. It would not count it 

toward completion. And if the student was not engaged, if 

they were in a module that didn't require, you know, 

regular quizzes, then the program would notify the 

student, try to get them back engaged, try to get them to 
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actually do more of the interacting with the system, etc. 

So that was the most sophisticated version of this that I 

saw. The other one that I was referring to a moment ago, 

essentially this- the system did track log-ins, and it 

tracked broadly what the student- that the student was in 

a particular part of the system, but then it essentially 

did nothing else, and the school simply took- whenever 

the student would complete a module, the school took a 

period of time that it thought that would normally take a 

student to complete that module, and then it added those 

completed clock hours into the student's clock hours that 

they were said to have completed toward Title IV 

eligibility. And we- you know, essentially we in that 

[inaudible] we had to tell the school that that was 

insufficient to meet the requirements. So, you know, and 

those two examples, obviously run a gamut. There are lots 

of other versions of this that we saw during the period.

MS. KLEIN: Okay. Thanks. That's 

helpful.

MR. ROBERTS: Alright. Scott, you are 

up next. Go for it.

MR. DOLAN: Yeah. Just, follow up in 

terms of, do you have a sense of the number of programs, 

that will be impacted by the change, that you're 

recommending here? And you've outlined some of the 
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problems but do you have a sense of the clock-hour 

programs that exist out there? You know, what percentage 

of the institutions were seen to have- been missing some 

of these components? And I guess what would be the 

alternative for those institutions that were doing things 

appropriately in an asynchronous environment and had the 

technology to monitor and regulate, well- you know, and 

they were doing that in a distance way asynchronously, 

what would be the alternatives for them? Would they be 

forced to switch?

MR. MUSSER: So first on the data, we 

don't have comprehensive data about which of these 

programs were online for the- some of the reasons I just 

mentioned in the earlier topic. We do know in certain 

cases that schools that are offering, for example, 

cosmetology schools that have identified themselves as 

distance ed, we do know who they are, if they if they 

have told us that they are offering distance ed 

coursework. But that's an incomplete picture, we think, 

of the number of institutions and programs that are using 

it. So we're not sure, unfortunately. The- with respect 

to the- your other question, under this proposal, that 

institution that previously had allowed students to earn 

clock hours through the asynchronous learning would need 

to if they wanted to continue offering distance 
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education, they would have to transition to a synchronous 

form of distance education where the instructor and the 

students were present for the lesson, as they worked 

through the material, and that time was recorded, and 

those hours logged by the actual attendance of the 

student. And- or they could simply revert to, you know, 

physical campus instruction as they had previously.

MR. DOLAN: Is the- is it possible to 

follow up? Is it an issue of your- of the inability to 

enforce the regulation? Or is it that the regulation is 

in and of itself incorrect, right? The idea that 

asynchronous learning isn't something that is eligible? 

Because it seems like the existing regulation enables, 

you know, to an accreditor or the Department to identify 

an institution or an organization that's not meeting its 

intent in terms of tracking the asynchronous learning 

that's occurring. So I guess the wholesale change, is 

that because of the difficulty of enforcing it or some 

larger question about asynchronous learning, as defined?

MR. MUSSER: I'll let Denise start.

MS. MORELLI: Well, I think- and Dave 

gave the one example where I guess we did approve it, but 

I'm not aware of any others. The problem we had seen a 

lot, like I said, of abuse. So I'm not sure there was any 

other institutions besides the one that David said who 
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actually could meet the definition of clock-hour with the 

interaction that is necessary for the hands-on work. And 

so I think the Department weighed all that and determined 

that it really isn't something that can be done 

asynchronously and meet the definition of a clock-hour 

and meet what the clock-hour programs are supposed to do 

for students. If that answers your question.

MR. DOLAN: It does. It just- I guess 

it calls into question whether that's true of all 

programs that are clock-hour programs. And if we're 

taking an isolated instance and applying it to the 

remainder of programs. And I would imagine there are 

clock-hour programs that exist out there that aren't 

solely focused on hands-on or in the cosmetology section. 

So just trying to be clear about a kind of change in 

regulation and the impact that that might have on other 

institutions that are outside of that realm and who arewho have been and are following the regulations as 

stipulated.

MR. ROBERTS: Okay. Thank you. Joe, I 

see your hand. I do just want to note that Amy is coming 

to the table on behalf of specialized accreditors. We'll 

get to her next. But before that, Joe, go ahead. You're 

muted Joe. There'll be a yearbook superlatives for the 

most muted at the end of this.
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MR. WEGLARZ: Sorry about that. Just 

at least I think they should be very general questions 

regarding clock-hour schools. How many schools are clockhour schools in the industry? Percentage? An estimate? 

And then my second part to that question is out of those 

schools, and this is a pretty global question, so I 

apologize upfront, how many of those students actually 

receive Title IV funding, I guess in comparison to nonclock-hour schools? So I understand if, you know, you 

don't have the answer to that, but I was just curious if 

you did.

MR. MUSSER: That's a good question. I 

don't have the answer in front of me. That is obviously 

something we can pull for you guys. You know, the clockhow many clock-hour schools that we're talking about. The 

question about Title IV eligibility, I can speak to. The 

clock-hour programs typically are organized around 

occupational learning. And we do see a larger proportion 

of low income students enrolled in many of these 

programs. And many of the programs, in fact, are driven 

primarily by receipt of Title IV Aid, including Pell 

Grants. So it is quite common for students in these 

programs to be Title IV eligible. And to the point where 

I would say that it would be unusual for a student not to 

qualify for Title IV Aid and frequently they also are 
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eligible for Pell.

MR. WEGLARZ: Thank you.

MR. ROBERTS: Alright. We'll go next 

to Amy. Go ahead.

MS. ACKERSON: Thank you. Just a 

question about the- removing the allowance for distance 

ed for asynchronous learning altogether. In dealing with 

nursing and allied health programs specifically, and I'm 

just going to speak to those because that's the world 

I've lived in for so long, we talked to a lot of career 

and technical centers with LPN programs and surgical tech 

programs and things like that, that all run in clock 

hours for their core curriculum. Just the question I have 

is if those schools, which many of them do, they team up 

or partner with a community college for the majority of 

those support course credits or science courses, so I'm 

just going to use a for-instance, so, for instance, I'm 

an LPN student at the local career center. I'm getting 

the majority of my clock-hour instruction at the career 

center. But then the career center has a partnership for 

the articulation of my anatomy, physiology, psychology 

per se. And let's say some of those are offered in an 

online format asynchronously. So the- I believe what 

they're doing traditionally for the clock-hour conversion 

is whatever that college has determined the clock-hour to 
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be on those credit hours, if that makes sense. So if we 

eliminate the asynchronous piece, does that also 

eliminate their ability to form those partnerships with 

the community college or I guess sometimes it's a fouryear university, in order to award all that credit for 

the clock-hour program? And I can rephrase that if it 

didn't make sense.

MR. MUSSER: I think it did, but I 

might need a bit more information to fully understand the 

situation. It sounds like- you mentioned conversion. And 

when we when you use the word conversion, the clock to 

credit hour conversion is actually only used when a 

program is offered for Title IV purposes in credit hours. 

But in many cases it has either a clock-hour component or 

it's because of the regulations, the school has to 

determine how many clock hours comprise each of its 

credit hours that it's assigning to students. In most 

cases where students are enrolled in both types of 

coursework if the school is allowed to, generally, the 

school will offer its programs in credit hours and 

perform the conversion if it's required to under the 

Department's regulations and in order to determine Title 

IV eligibility. I don't know if that's the case in the 

situation you're describing, but for by and large, if 

it's a clock-hour program, they can't take coursework 
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offered in credit hours or from another institution 

without tracking completed clock hours for that student 

in the same way that they do for the clock-hour portion. 

So that- the reason I say that is that's very- that does 

not happen very often. In fact, I don't think I've ever 

seen that happen. Those programs are nearly always 

offered if there's these partnerships, as credit hour 

programs, in which case this would not apply.

MS. ACKERSON: Okay. So, if that's the 

case, if an institution has been awarding what, let's 

say, career degrees, I don't know what else to say. 

Completion certificates, career certificates in clock 

hours, then the credit-hour to clock-hour conversion, it 

was probably set up the other way around is what you're 

saying.

MR. MUSSER: Probably. Again, I don't 

know the exact situation at this particular institution, 

but I- like I said, I can't think of a case where an 

institution structured a partnership, where the other 

school that offers traditional credit-hour coursework was 

willing to track clock hours for students. They typically 

just won't- they won't do that. It's too much work for 

them to do it, but it could be the case. And in the case 

that you described, if this really is a clock-hour 

program, then the- everything that we just described 
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would apply, where they can't earn hours, clock hours 

toward Title IV eligibility through the coursework that's 

asynchronous. But of course, they could earn those hours 

through the- any synchronous online coursework and of 

course, through any in-person coursework that they're 

taking- at either campus, if it's measured and tracked.

MS. ACKERSON: Okay. Thank you.

MR. ROBERTS: Alright. Thank you both. 

I just want to briefly note that Erika has rejoined the 

table as a primary negotiator for a private nonprofit 

IHEs. But we'll turn next to JoEllen.

MS. PRICE: So if these changes were 

to go through, when would they become effective? And what 

happens to students that are in the middle of these 

programs? How do we help the students finish a program 

that they could very well be successful in, or will it 

cut students off midway?

MR. MUSSER: I don't think we've 

gotten that far in our thinking yet. I think we're open 

to a variety of approaches if the committee has certain 

suggestions on how this would work when implemented. And 

I'll just give examples for how we've done this in other 

situations. One of the regulations that will go into 

effect changing program length for some programs on July 

1st, we are allowing schools to teach out all of their 
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students at the longer program length who had- who 

enrolled prior to July 1st and then requiring the school 

to only enroll students into the shorter program starting 

on July 1st and moving forward. So that's one approach 

that we could take. I don't want to say that we'll take 

any particular approach right now. I think we'd have to 

think that through and decide which- what was- whatwhich way was best.

MR. ROBERTS: Okay. Anyone else? And I

do want to note where we're a little over five minutes 

from public comments. So folks who are watching, if you 

have received an email confirmation about a speaking slot 

today, if you want to log in about 15 minutes early, that 

would really help us, get you in on time. Diana, go 

ahead.

MS. HOOLEY: Thank you. I'll be brief 

on this. I share the Department's concerns about online 

programs offering asynchronous learning and I'm glad 

that- and are glad that the Department's, you know, 

taking a look at that. The states have previously- some 

of the states have previously expressed concerns that 

without proper oversight and protections that online 

programs can run the risk of just becoming expensive 

textbooks online. So I think that, you know, particularly 

that's troubling when you're talking about when folks are 
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supposed to be getting hands-on learning. So, for that 

reason, you know, we're glad that the Department is 

taking a look at this, and is trying to trying to address 

the issue.

MR. WEATHERS: Alright, thank you 

Diana. John, we'll go to you next.

MR. WARE: Yeah, real quickly, just to 

answer Joe's question from earlier, at the state level, 

we approve a lot of clock-hour programs, mostly short 

term, non- the vast majority are non-Title IV programs. 

They tend to be like bartending, dog grooming, dental 

assisting. But there's a lot of them that are clock hours 

that get approved at the state level. Some of those and 

we've had issues too, like the Department, like Dave 

mentioned, trying to figure out a proper clock-hour 

calculation for asynchronous distance ed programs. And 

it's- it is challenging. Although, again, most of the 

programs we're dealing with are much fewer hours, clock 

hours, typically, let's say less than 100 clock hours. So 

it's not as quite as complex as trying to look at a 900-

hour asynchronous program and determine the clock hours. 

But there are still, as I mentioned, a lot of clock-hour 

programs, short-term ones approved at the state level. 

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you, John. Any 

concluding comments from the Department or the Committee 
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on issue paper number three? Greg, Dave, Denise, is there 

anything else that you wanted to pose to the committee to 

consider before we transition over to public comment?

MR. MARTIN: Nothing for me.

MR. MUSSER: Nothing for me either.

MR. ROBERTS: Okay. Well, I'll thank 

you all for the discussion today. Thank you for moving 

through the agenda. It was a robust agenda, but we moved 

through it in a nicely-timed fashion. We'll move now to 

public comment. Everyone's welcome to come on camera. The 

alternate negotiators and primaries who might have 

stepped away are welcome to come on screen if they'd like 

to. Just as a brief reminder to everyone about how public 

comment is going to work. We have 30 minutes of public 

comment, reserved at the end of each day. Members of the 

public are invited to join and address the committee for 

three minutes. They'll be given a 30-second heads up when 

there are 2 minutes and 30 seconds. And we endeavor to 

accommodate as many of these requests as we possibly can. 

We always get more requests for public comment than we 

can actually fill typically in the 30-minute slots. So 

that's why we try to use every moment we possibly can. So 

I guess we're okay to admit our first speaker for the 

day. Krystil, who are we welcoming first?

MS. K. SMITH: So our first speaker is 
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Adam Young. He's representing himself and he should be in 

the meeting.

MR. ROBERTS: Good afternoon, Adam. 

Can you hear me?

MR. YOUNG: Yes, I can hear you.

MR. ROBERTS: Excellent. We can hear 

you and see you. Welcome to public comment. You'll be 

given three minutes to make your comment. You'll be given 

a 30-second heads up, and your time will begin whenever 

you're ready.

MR. YOUNG: Thank you for having me. 

I'm ready. Hi, my name is Adam T. Young. I served in the 

Navy from 2003 until 2007. I was enrolled in Full Sail 

University from 2020 to 2023, a for-profit school. 

Because my time is limited, I'll skip over some of the 

school's offensive- offenses, like their job guarantees 

and the fact that other schools would not accept any of 

the credits I earned there. Instead, I'll be focusing on 

the low-quality education I received. I enrolled in Full 

Sail's game design program for a bachelor's degree. I 

received an associate's degree, but left before 

completing my bachelor's due to the quality of the 

education. Going into the program, I expected the degree 

would lead to job opportunities, but I was wrong. Much of 

the curriculum was so outdated it might as well had been 
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from the Stone age. We were initially taught using Unity 

and Visual Studio systems. Later, when the courses 

switched to modern programs like Unreal Engine using 

blueprint, they did nothing to teach us how to use them. 

Eventually, I learned that the gaming industry does not 

even recognize game design as a legitimate degree because 

it is too broad. Full Sail felt like such a scam school. 

I often was better off learning through tutoring, google 

searches, and YouTube videos than I was following the 

actual instructions from its online courses. To make 

matters worse, the terminology and policies changed 

drastically from one class to another, creating confusion 

and hampering the learning experience. It was difficult 

to learn basic concepts and build upon them effectively. 

On top of these more general issues, the teaching and 

specific classes ranged from bad to offensive, with many 

of the professors serving as little more than glorified 

lab assistants. Some of the teachers prioritized their 

own interests over the students, while others gave 

inadequate instruction. One teacher consistently lied, 

gaslit students, and unfairly accused us of cheating. 

Worst of all, one teacher made disparaging comments about 

people with cognitive disabilities. Full Sail also seemed 

to diminish mental health concerns. School administrators 

either ignored out- the outreach or responded with 
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boilerplate emails. It felt like a kick to the face. I 

think Full Sail is what happens when schools prioritize 

profit over educational quality. Today, I'm asking you to 

consider rules that would push accreditors to tighten the 

reins on scam schools, like Full Sail, and ensure that 

[30 seconds]- Okay. Today, I am asking you to consider 

rules that would push accreditors to tighten the reins on 

scam schools like Full Sail, and ensure that other 

students do not waste their time at schools that do not 

care for their students. Thank you for your time.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you, Adam, for 

your comment. We appreciate it.

MR. YOUNG: You're welcome.

MR. ROBERTS: Krystil, I think we can 

welcome our next speaker. Who are we hearing from next?

MS. K. SMITH: Yes, next. We have Luke 

Downs. He's representing himself, and he is on.

MR. ROBERTS: Great. Luke, welcome. 

Can you hear me?

MR. DOWNS: Can you hear me?

MR. ROBERTS: Yes, we can hear you. 

And we can see you. You might want to tilt your camera 

down just a little bit. But welcome to public comment. 

Perfect. You'll have three minutes to address the 

committee. You'll be given a 30-second heads up and your 
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time will begin whenever you're ready.

MR. DOWNS: Sure. Yeah. I'm ready.

MR. ROBERTS: Okay. Go ahead.

MR. DOWNS: Cool. So thanks for giving 

me the opportunity to share my experience. My name is 

Luke Downs. I was a medic in the army from Fort Carson, 

deployed to Afghanistan 2015 to 2019. So basically what 

happened was I did two years of undergrad at- undergrad 

at Ohio State, and then I wanted to transfer to a nursing 

program. So I transferred to the school called Hondros 

College of Nursing, and I had probably about half of my 

GI Bill benefits remaining. And, I completed the whole 

program, and all I needed to do was pass this final class 

called Nurse 240. And a part of this Nurse 240 class was 

a- just a school-set score that you needed to get a 900 

on this exit exam. That's like a practice exam. It's not 

a licensing exam or anything. It's just a test score that 

they had made up and set their own, you know, standard of 

what they needed to pass that was pretty high. So I ended 

up getting an 894 on it and a 890. So they told me I 

wasn't allowed to graduate with that. And then I camethey made me do it again, and I got an 894. So they ended 

up disenrolling me from the program and not allowing me 

to graduate or use any of my transcripts from nursing 

school to transfer to another school. And none of these 
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transcripts and credits transferred. So I was like, 

completely, just in a bad situation. I had nothing to 

show for any of my benefits used for passing all of 

nursing school. So basically I had to get reinstated into 

the program. They dropped the score down to 850. I ended 

up getting an 888 and was allowed to graduate, but this 

set me back six more months from when I was supposed to 

graduate, and I had to use my entire benefits, and just 

barely graduated. Like, it was a really, really close 

call. So I'm just kind of bringing that up to everyone 

that maybe something could be done about that to limit, 

like, high stakes testing and stuff to graduate for 

nursing programs or similar programs because it leaves 

veterans and other students in situations where they 

could potentially come out with nothing for all the time 

that they put in for their using their benefits [30 

seconds] so but yeah, as of right now, though, I did 

graduate and I just have to pass the NCLEX to get my RN. 

But it was a pretty close call. And I know that there's 

other students that were not as fortunate as me that 

ended up, you know, not even being able to graduate and 

they had to completely switch up careers or, you know, 

start going to school for something else. So I just 

wanted to share my story on that one, because I was 

really close to using up all my benefits for nothing.
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MR. WEATHERS: Time, sir.

MR. DOWNS: Thank you.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you for your 

comment. We appreciate it. 

MS. K. SMITH: Okay, Brady. Next we 

have Shawn Bonita who is representing himself. He's in 

the room.

MR. ROBERTS: Great. Shawn, good 

afternoon.

MR. BONITA: Hi. Good afternoon. Can 

you guys hear me?

MR. ROBERTS: We can. We can see you 

as well. Welcome to Public comment. You'll have three 

minutes to address the committee. You'll be given a 30-

second heads up and your time is going to begin whenever 

you're ready.

MR. BONITA: Okay. Good afternoon. My 

name is Shawn Bonita. I served in the Navy from 2003 

until 2009. After leaving the Navy, I decided to use my 

GI Bill benefits to attend college. I started off at a 

local community college, but then enrolled in Westwood 

College to study computer management with a concentration 

in networking. I did my research before enrolling in the 

school to make sure that the GI Bill was approved, and I 

thought that meant that the VA had vetted the school and 
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it would be good to go. During my first year, I mostly 

took my gen ed classes, which were fine. After that, I 

began to take more classes in my major, and that's when 

things started to get sketchy. Westwood College claimed 

they were revamping the program, but in reality they 

meant- that meant that they fired the best teachers and 

hired people who did not know what they were doing. 

Instead of teaching, the instructors would often just 

throw text up on screen, and we had to read it and figure 

out for ourselves. At this point, I was about halfway 

through the program and decided I would be better off 

completing the program than quitting. Though I was able 

to push myself to study hard and teach myself the 

material, many of my peers were not. Once I graduated, it 

was as the school said, bye, thank you for your money. 

Westwood provided no guidance at all as I began looking 

for my employment, though they had promised well-paying 

jobs at big tech companies such as Google and Oracle. 

Their career office was totally unreachable. And by this 

point I had used up all of my GI Bill benefits and had 

taken out almost $5,000 in loans, Federal loans. 

Eventually, I moved back home and was able to get a local 

tech job at my local school district. But that was not 

due to my education at Westwood. To move on in my career, 

I will have to start all over because no one recognizes a 
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degree from Westwood College and none of my credits will 

transfer. I know that the VA will- I now know that the VA 

does approve GI Bill benefits at virtually any accredited 

college. Because of that, it is crucial that accrediting 

agencies are diligent when reviewing schools so that 

veterans do not end up wasting their GI Bill benefits on 

a worthless degree. Thank you for your time.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you, Shawn, for 

your time. We appreciate it. Okay, Krystil, I think we 

can welcome our next speaker.

MS. K. SMITH: Okay. Our next speaker 

is Sally Olsen. Sally is representing herself, and she 

should be in the room.

MR. ROBERTS: Great. Good afternoon, 

Sally, can you hear me?

MS. K. SMITH: Sally, if she- if you 

can come on camera, Sally, and unmute your microphone. 

Okay, I don'tMS. OLSEN: Can you hear me?

MS. K. SMITH: Yes.

MR. ROBERTS: Yeah, we can hear you. 

Do you want to turn on your camera as well?

MS. OLSEN: Well, I don't have video. 

I mean, I don't look- [inaudible] I'm sorry about that. I 

don't know- I've been sick.
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MR. ROBERTS: No, don't apologize. We 

can hear you, though. You're coming in quite clearly. But 

welcome to public comment. You'll have three minutes to 

address the committee. You'll be given a 30-second heads 

up, and your time will begin whenever you start speaking.

MS. OLSEN: Okay. Thank you. Hello, my 

name is Sally Olsen. I am speaking today to tell you 

about how I made the biggest mistake ever going back to 

school. I'm a Marine Corps veteran, and in 2004, I- at 

age 45, I was laid off from my job and I decided to go 

back to college and get a bachelor's degree. I signed up 

to attend an online school named American 

Intercontinental University. I studied business 

management. The recruiters promised that my degree would 

get me- the recruiters promise that my degree would get 

me- get me a great job and earn a high salary. And I was 

told more than once that I could make my own hours and 

attend class anytime I wanted. To say the least, the 

courses were not what I expected. They were extremely 

rushed. I was given my associate's degree in a year and 

my bachelor's degree the next year. The information was 

crammed in and it was really difficult keeping up with 

online chats from the professors. I did not learn 

anything. I was put on the Dean's list, and I don't even 

know how that was possible based on what I was learning. 
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I thought about leaving, but felt that I had made a 

commitment and I was trying my best. The recruiters' 

promises about how my degree would help me get a job and 

make more money were not true. That never happened. When 

I first enrolled at AIU, I also took a temp job at a 

company. I worked that job all while going to school. I 

still have that same job today. It does not require a 

degree and after I got my bachelor's degree, I was not 

able to get a promotion or a different job. I have never 

gotten any benefit from my AIU degree. I took out Federal 

Student Loans to attend AIU and I did not understand what 

I was doing. I think I ended up with $70,000 or more in 

debt. I have never had the high salary that AIU promised. 

Going to school at AIU was such a huge, huge mistake. 

Looking back though, I don't know how I would have known 

to make a different decision. The school was approved. I 

trusted it when the recruiters told me what the school 

could do for me, and about the kind of education I would 

receive. I hope you will do something to make sure 

accreditors do a better job approving schools. Thank you 

for your time.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you Sally. We 

appreciate your comment.

MS. OLSEN: Thank you.

MR. ROBERTS: Krystil. Who can we 
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welcome next?

MS. K. SMITH: Yes. Our next speaker 

is Stephanie Pollay, who is representing herself. She's 

in the room.

MR. ROBERTS: Oh, great. Stephanie. 

Good afternoon.

MS. POLLAY: Good afternoon.

MR. ROBERTS: Excellent. We can hear 

you and see you. So you'll have three minutes to address 

the committee. You'll be given a quick, 30-second heads 

up at 2 minutes and 30 seconds, and your time will begin 

whenever you're ready.

MS. POLLAY: Okay, great. Good 

afternoon. My name is Stephanie Pollay. I served in the 

United States Air Force from 2001 to 2003. After the 

service I decided to go back to school. I was from a blue 

collar family that was convinced college was for rich 

people, and trade schools were for poor people like me. I 

recalled ITT tech as a reputable trade school in the 

1980s, and I thought I would get a good education there. 

That was a mistake. I attended ITT in person and online 

from 2006 to 2012. During my first year going to school 

in person at ITT, I also worked there and saw how the 

school operated. I slowly realized the school targeted 

low-income students like me, who were completely naive to 
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the innerworkings of the higher education system. For 

example, when I signed up for the student loans, it was 

literally at night in a back room and it was very cloak 

and dagger. We did not have the guardrails that most

students have at normal colleges. The education we 

received was laughable. Many of the professors were 

unqualified to be teaching, though the school advertised 

placing 90% of its students in jobs of their chosen 

field. I was one of the only people in my program who got 

a job related to my degree. However, this had nothing to 

do with the school's efforts. A temp agency I found 

connected me with that job. Because I had not learned 

anything in my classes, I had to learn everything on the 

job. Later in class, my teachers would direct my 

classmates to speak with me because I knew more about the 

subject matter than the teachers did. By the end of my 

time there, it became evident that the school was just a 

diploma mill. For example, one of my classmates stopped 

attending school for the last several months of the 

program, and he was still able to graduate with our 

class. Once I graduated, I wanted to continue my 

education at a better school. However, my credits were 

next to impossible to transfer. Attending ITT was a 

complete waste of time and money. After speaking with 

friends who attended normal colleges, I found out that 
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not only was I wrong about only rich people being able to 

attend normal colleges, but that I had been scammed 

because I was paying three times what they were. I knew 

then that there were many people who thought like I did, 

and ITT knew that too and they exploited it for all it 

was worth. My credit was ruined. I can't get my GI Bill 

back, and I lost an entire decade of my life struggling 

with the damage this caused. I still don't understand why 

there was a special accreditation process for ITT, and 

how such accreditors were able to receive Federal funding 

in the first place. Therefore, today I'm asking you to 

push for rules that require accreditors to exercise 

greater scrutiny and evaluating schools. I also request 

you more closely and regularly monitor such rules are 

maintained. If you don't care, why should they? Thank you 

for your time.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you, Stephanie, 

for your comment. We appreciate it. Okay, Krystil, who 

can we welcome next?

MS. K. SMITH: Our next speaker is Dr. 

Edward Conroy, from New America. Edward is in the room. 

There he is.

MR. ROBERTS: Great. Can you hear me, 

Dr. Conroy?

DR. CONROY: Yep. Can you hear me 
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okay?

MR. ROBERTS: Yes, we can hear you and 

see you. You'll have three minutes to address the 

committee. You'll be given a quick, 30-second heads up 

and your time will begin whenever you're ready.

DR. CONROY: Thank you so much. My 

name is Dr. Edward Conroy, and I'm the senior policy 

advisor with New America's higher education team. New 

America focuses our work on creating a higher education 

system that is accessible, affordable, equitable, and 

accountable for helping students lead fulfilling and 

economically secure lives. We are glad to see the 

Department working to improve Federal regulations and to 

repeat Under Secretary Kvaal's opening remarks, make sure 

that we're worthy of the trust students place in higher 

education when they enroll. We would like to raise, as we 

do at every neg reg, the issue of balanced representation 

at the table. This is a structural and persistent issue 

with this process. While student and interests- student 

and institutional interests often do align, they don't 

always. That is why we need balanced representation at 

the table and we don't have it currently. Institutions 

have five distinct seats to represent different types of 

school, along with many other voices that have an 

institutional lens, including accreditors and financial 
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aid administrators. Given that, we would like to support 

the idea of separating the collapsed consumer protection 

and civil rights seats, as has been done in many recent 

rulemakings to try to bring, if not fully, some more 

balance to the discussion. We applaud the efforts to make 

accreditation regulations more robust. Extensive work by 

New America and others has shown that accreditation too 

often fails to protect students from poor outcomes and 

predatory institutions. We are particularly glad to see 

reductions in the amount of time institutions can be out 

of compliance with their accreditor before they lose 

accreditation. We also welcome the Department's proposals 

codifying robust requirements for accreditor complaint 

processes. New America's research has shown that many 

accrediting agencies complaint policies seem designed to 

limit the number of complaints they receive. Given this, 

we believe codifying these requirements will help ensure 

that complaints about institutions are handled in a 

timely and responsive manner. We are, however, concerned 

that several accreditation proposals have significant 

room for improvement. Accreditors must be required to use 

reliable and comparable data in order for the assessment 

of outcomes to be effective. The revised regulations 

should implement standard shared definitions for student 

achievement, so that assessment of metrics like 
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graduation retention are consistent across all 

accreditors and institutions. The student achievement 

rules, as proposed, continue to allow institutions to 

self-determine the thresholds for success when it comes 

to things like graduation and retention. We suggest that 

accreditors should be required to set bright line 

standards that they determine in consultation with 

schools. These metrics should be set and measured using 

defensible, accurate and reliable data. Achievement 

standards should then be married to robust DEI standards, 

so that when colleges have disparities in outcomes for 

different groups of students, especially historically 

marginalized students, they are able to focus 

interventions and resources to ensure that all students 

have an equal chance of success. Finally, on issues 

related to teach out plans and agreements, we encourage 

the Department to err on the side of caution and craft 

regulations that require [30 seconds] to enter- to enter 

into teach out agreements if there is any concern about 

the school's viability. Teach out plans are much harder 

to implement when an institution begins to fail. Thank 

you so much to the committee for your time.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you for your 

comment. Alright, Krystil, who are we hearing from next?

MS. K. SMITH: Next we have Michael 
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Nelson, who's representing himself. He's in the room.

MR. ROBERTS: Michael, can you hear 

me? You are on mute right now if you're trying to.

MR. NELSON: Okay. Alright. There we 

go. Now I can hear you. Yes, I'm having my class to quiet 

down right now. I'm sorry.

MR. ROBERTS: That's alright. That's 

alright. Welcome. You'll have three minutes to address 

the committee. You'll be given a 30-second heads up when 

your time is about to expire. And your time will begin 

whenever you're ready to start speaking and your 

classroom is, in fact, quiet.

MR. NELSON: Oh, they quiet. They 

quiet. We good to go. Are you ready? Alright, alright. 

Thank you. First of all, first, my name is Michael 

Nelson. I want to thank you all for the opportunity to be 

able to share my personal experience. I attended 

accreditation school that abruptly got closed a few 

months ago during my final set of classes. I was in my 

last two classes to graduate and they closed down. I 

served in the United States Army for 12 active duty 

years. Years later, opportunity presented itself that 

allowed me to leverage my skills from the military to 

they required me to return back to college. I've been 

teaching culinary arts here at a public school at the 
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Billard Johnson School here in Crowley, Texas, and 

teaching- and I also teach dual credit for Lamar State 

University. When I was hired, I was under the impression 

that I would need a bachelor's degree by end of school 

year, or at least have at least near graduation to 

maintain my employment. After months of research, I 

decided to go to the Art Institute of Dallas. My 

experience was there was less than ideal, to be honest. 

The classwork there and the environment was more of a doit-yourself kind of approach of learning. The majority of 

the assignments is kind of like, hey, do it pretty much 

by use of YouTube and little faculty engagement, because 

most people was kind of looking to start employment 

elsewhere and there was very minimum hands-on learning. 

So I was very close to completing my degree and bachelor 

degree. And as I went on ahead and did my last two 

classes, right when I got ready to get started, I 

received the email that the school was about to go ahead 

and close down immediately. Due to that, that caused me 

what a lot of issues, and they was not able to offer me 

no options because is there another school I could 

transfer to complete my program? They didn't have any. 

This effect has put my immediate educational progress on 

hold now, due to the fact I had to report back to my job 

and let them know I wasn't able to finish the bachelor's 
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degree, they're still giving me time to try to seek it 

elsewhere, but the only thing is, bachelor's in culinary 

is not a very common thing. You usually will find 

associate degree programs, and even though we have a lot 

of community colleges, they don't give bachelor's degree 

program. So due to the lack of proper communication and 

guidance from the closure of the school, me as well as 

the other students were left stranded without information 

about tuition reimbursements, transcripts, any kind of 

operations, any type of option to finish our education, 

at the absent of a concrete plan and a support from AI, 

created new stress for us and also potentially financial 

gain if I don't find something here soon. In light of 

these challenges, I would strongly advocate for the 

increased oversight to prevent similar abrupt closures in 

the future. And just want to say thank you for hearingtaking the time out to hear me.

MR. ROBERTS: Of course. Thank you 

very much for your comment. We appreciate it.

MR. NELSON: Thank you, sir.

MR. ROBERTS: Have a great rest of 

your day.

MR. NELSON: You too. Thank you. 

MR. ROBERTS: That's your classroom. 

You got that- you got really under your thumb. Who- I 
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believe this is our final speaker for today. Krystil, who 

are we welcoming?

MS. K. SMITH: That is correct. Our 

final speaker is Jeremy Winn from Gays Harbor College. 

Jeremy is in the room.

MR. MARTIN: Great. Jeremy, can you 

hear us?

MR. WINN: I can, thank you. Yeah, I'm 

Jeremy Winn from Gays Harbor College. I am the e-learning 

administrator at my institution and also the outgoing 

chair of the Washington e-learning Council. I actually 

attended today to listen in to your discussion on policy 

for- finding the title here, Institutional- Program 

Integrity and Institutional Quality. And I just want to 

briefly voice my support for the policy that you've 

discussed today. A lot of great discussion. I appreciate 

the clarity that you brought to that proposed policy. My 

public comment is actually going to be directed towards 

the SARA portion of today's discussion. I did have some 

concerns about some of the language in that policy, 

particularly the first portion, related to governance. 

And I think the sentiment that I kind of wanted to 

address, find the words here. I think the concern that 

part of the policy was trying to address was decisionmaking by non-state actors. And I guess my thoughts in 
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summation there are that I feel like some of the 

proposals are maybe inappropriately trying to take what 

is already sort of a state agreed system, right, where 

the states already have the agency to decide whether to 

permit their institutions to operate under this, what was 

already collectively sort of an MOU. And they have the 

ability to opt in or opt out of that. And so I feel like 

the states have generally abdicated the input to enforce 

consumer protections as a whole. And so speaking at my 

institution and my peer institutions, I noticed that a 

lot of us have stronger protections now and we've done 

more. We have thick binders to be in compliance with the 

SARA requirements. And so I want to recognize that 

collectively, I think SARA has really upped the game 

where a lot of states have abdicated their responsibility 

to do that work. And I do fear that having more state 

involvement in governance might actually cause us to 

recede in progress that we've made. And so I guess I 

would just urge, you know, to not conflate the difference 

between state oversight and governance versus decisionmaking. I think the system we have now, we're involved 

professionals, are highly engaged in the decision-making. 

[30 seconds]. Thank you. I think it's also completely 

appropriate to have more government oversight and 

involvement. Those are different things, though, right? 
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It's totally possible for us to have government oversight 

and involvement and have, you know, the superseding, 

governing authority but to be able to delegate that to 

the professionals who know the field well, and I'm 

concerned that that policy will, as others have noted, 

preclude people with experience and expertise from owning 

that decision-making. Thank you. 

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you very much for 

your comment. Okay, I believe that wraps our public 

comment section for the day. And indeed, the remainder of 

our agenda for day two. We'll kick things off tomorrow at 

10 a.m. eastern with issue paper number four, which is 

R2T4, I believe the Return of Title IV Funds. Thank you 

all again for your diligent work today, and we will see 

you tomorrow.

 
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Zoom Chat Transcript

Program Integrity and Institutional Quality- Session 1, Day 2, 

Afternoon, January 9, 2024 

*Chat was copied as presented, as a result minor typos or grammatical 

errors may be present.

From P. JoEllen Price, Financial Aid Administrators to Everyone:

https://nc-sara.org/complaint-reports-dashboard

From Denise.Morelli ED OGC to Everyone:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1001

From A, Rob Anderson, State Officials to Everyone:

Just a clarifying point, Greg stated that NC-SARA is proprietary. 

It is a non-profit.

From P - Erika Linden - Private Nonprofit IHEs to Everyone:

Scott Dolan is going to step in for Private Nonprofits as I have 

to leave the meeting for a time.

From P-John Ware, State Regulator to Everyone:

My alternate Rob Anderson has some comments on this issue as well 

so I will defer to him.

From P, Jillian Klein, Proprietary Instit to Everyone:

Florida and Tennessee both have annual reviews and reporting 

requirements, where LBMA can be lost if institutions don't comply with 

state requirements. Thanks for the comments on CA, Robyn - seems it 

varies by states.

From P Jamie Studley, Institutional Accreditors to Everyone:

I'd like to hand off to alternate McComis to comment on this 

topic

From P, DC, HBCUs, TCUs, MSIs to Everyone:

In Response to this discussion and on #3: The Department of 

Education should continue to do what has done to garner influence, to 

use grant funds and appropriations to structure and support state 

authorization to handle issues that would be moved among the triad.

From A-Alyssa Dobson 4YR Public to Everyone:

I have to drop off at this time. I’ll see you all tomorrow! The 

primary negotiator is remaining here for participation.

From Brady Roberts- FMCS Facilitator to Everyone:

Reacted to "I have to drop off a..." with ���

From (A) Zack Goodwin (he/him), Financial Aid Administrators to 

Everyone:

I acknowledge it's not granular, student-level data, but we do 

report via IPEDS what portion of students are enrolled in distance 

education courses and to what extent (e.g., 100% online, partially 

online).

From A, Magin Sanchez, Civil Rights/Consumer to Everyone:
118

Program Integrity and 

Institutional Quality – 1/9/24

Question of clarification for ED, PEP (Prison Education) programs 

are already required to be reported as a new location. For schools 

that offer PEP programs within a facility, some of which are onlineonly and some of which are not, would there need to be two PEP 

locations created -- one virtual and one brick-and-mortar?

From Carolyn Fast to Everyone:

My alternate Magin is going to join the table to comment.

From Carolyn Fast to Everyone:

Agree with Diana that that info on use of OPMs would be useful.

From P. JoEllen Price, Financial Aid Administrators to Everyone:

A. Zack Goodwin has a question and comment.

From P Jamie Studley, Institutional Accreditors to Everyone:

Michale will come to the table for instit accreditors.

From P Jamie Studley, Institutional Accreditors to Everyone:

If ED had that information what could it do with it? Is it able 

to analyze data at the individual student level? How would that relate 

to other ways of reporting outcomes?

From (P) Joe Weglarz NACUBO to Everyone:

Do we know if schools obtained this information?

From P, Laura Rasar King, Specialized Accreditors to Everyone:

Amy Ackerson has a question and will be coming in for specialized 

accreditors.

From A, Scott Dolan, Private/Nonprofit IHEs to Everyone:

yielding back to primary representative.

From P, Barmak Nassirian, Vets to Everyone:

Schools use high-stakes tests as a way of manipulating their 

licensure pass rates.