"For weeks, college leaders have been bracing for President Trump’s executive order requiring colleges to uphold free speech or risk losing federal grants. The suspense is over: The president signed the order on Thursday. The free-speech provisions ended up being vague, their impact uncertain. But other, unrelated portions of the order, 'Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities,' are much more specific. And it’s easier to predict how they could play out, because they build on an Obama-era push to help consumers make informed college choices," The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

"The order directs the U.S. Department of Education to add new pieces of data to the College Scorecard, a consumer-facing website introduced by the Obama administration. Notably, the order calls for program-level data, looking at former students’ median earnings, debt levels, and loan repayments. It also expands the scorecard’s reach into graduate programs.

And it instructs the department to offer a website and mobile application informing borrowers of federal student loans of their debt burdens and repayment options.

... Few policy ideas are less controversial than giving consumers more information. Many steps spelled out in the order were already underway, observers said, and none seemed to require an executive order. The Education Department could have made the changes on its own, in other words, with less fanfare.

What may be most surprising is how the order builds on the efforts of Trump’s immediate predecessor. 'The groundwork and infrastructure for this was laid down in the Obama administration,' said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

... While changing students’ college-shopping behavior is an intuitive way to improve their outcomes, it can only hope to matter to those students who are in fact shopping. And that’s hardly all of them. Sixty percent of first-time students applying for financial aid list only one college on their applications, Draeger noted.

Besides, using the information well can be tricky even for students making decisions at the graduate-school level, Draeger said. Take a student considering a master’s degree in social work. Looking at data points on earnings and loan debt might make that seem like a bad idea, he said. The picture changes considerably if the prospective student knows that he or she could qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

Observers wondered how the executive order squared with some of the administration’s other higher-education efforts. Draeger is all for more consumer information, he said. But it’s hard to accept it as a 'silver bullet' solution for improving college affordability from an administration whose recent budget proposal included 'drastic cuts' in student aid, he said."

NASFAA's "Notable Headlines" section highlights media coverage of financial aid to help members stay up to date with the latest news. Inclusion in Today's News does not imply endorsement of the material or guarantee the accuracy of information presented.

Publication Date: 3/22/2019