Yesterday morning Campus Progress attended the House Subcommittee for Education and Labor hearing on “Ensuring Student Eligibility Requirements for Federal Aid”. The hearing addressed how colleges and universities administer and enforce student eligibility requirements for federal financial aid.

In recent years, the Department of Education has begun auditing recipients of financial aid in order to ensure that the eligibility requirements are being enforced. They discovered that this was not the case and there were several incidents of fraud.

Testimonies at the hearing were given by Harris Miller, CEO/President of the Career College Association, Mary Mitchelson, Acting Inspector General of the Department of Education, and Robert Shireman, Deputy Undersecretary of the Department of Education. Mr. Miller set the tone of the discussion by stating that “there is no room for cheating in the rules of higher education”.

Cases of fraud [PDF] were found to be most common in ATB (Ability to Benefit) testing. The ATB test is administered to students who did not receive a high school diploma but wish to pursue a secondary education with federal financial aid. Mr. Miller presented evidence of cases where test administrators have given answers to students to ensure that they pass the test. Mr. Shireman argued that “this lack of oversight has resulted in fraudulent access to federal aid which questions the integrity of higher education”. The issue of online coursework was also of concern. Mrs. Mitchelson argued that fraud is common among students who take online courses, stating that the “online context has a lot of ambiguity of who is participating for what purpose”.

Federal financial aid plays a very important role in the ambitions of students, especially those students who don’t have the resources to attend college. The issue with ATB testing and online courses, however, is that they are often provided by for-profit schools which means they are profit driven and their intentions are not in the best interest of the student. These schools are constantly in trouble for aggressive recruiting practices. They make tons of money by recruiting as many people as possible while the students who don’t finish their courses end up in enormous amounts of debt.

Campus Progress is currently working to fight issues like these in our Students Over Banks campaign. If you want to learn more about this campaign, go to http://www.studentsoverbanks.org/