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Are new regulations lurking around the corner?

Committee to meet for final time to discuss state authorization

regulationsresized [1]The U.S. Department of Education’s Negotiated Rulemaking Committee [2] is nearing the end of its reworking of the federal online education regulations known as state authorization.

The language for the new guidelines is not expected to be finalized until later this week, but Russ Poulin, interim co-executive director of WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technology, detailed some of the changes in recent [3] blog posts. [4]

A major part of the regulations, Poulin said, concern reciprocity agreements [5], voluntary arrangements between various states and regions that ease some of the regulatory burdens for students taking online courses in different states.

Some of the newly proposed language would change how states handle student complaints.

“There is still strong support for reciprocity in the language even though some negotiators would like to see (what I think are) very strict requirements on reciprocal agreements,” Poulin said.

The guidelines would also change the way that states handle exempting institutions from following state authorization. The Department of Education originally proposed that states could no longer exempt institutions based on accreditation or years of service, a change that had many worried, Poulin said, as 45 states currently use exemptions.

(Next page: What compliance could cost universities)

“It was unclear if the Department was trying to force an extensive review by each state,” he said. “They were not. They feel that the state needs to ‘actively review’ the institution based on more criteria than just accreditation, since accreditation’s role is to focus on academic quality.”

The regulatory hoops institutions must jump through when serving students outside their states can already be numerous, but in 2010 the Department of Education released new regulations that linked state authorization to federal financial aid.

In June 2012, after a series of lawsuits challenging the regulation, the authorization was vacated by the U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals, but many educators and observers expected it to be reinstated.

The assembling of this Negotiated Rulemaking Committee in November [6] nudged that reinstatement closer to a reality, and they will meet for a final time around May 20. A draft of the regulations will then be released for public comment before being finalized as early as this fall.

Complying with state authorization rules could cost $143,000 per college or university, according to a WICHE survey of 230 institutions [7].

Poulin said in November that once the regulations are finalized, it won’t be long before the guidelines are reauthorized.

“The department has put the institutions on notice for years now since 2010, so it may end up being a fairly short deadline to become authorized,” he said. “It won’t be a really long timeline after they’ve released the final regulations.”