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Policymakers in recent months have increasingly turned their focus to issues within higher education – college affordability, accountability, and student success. But while the federal government spends billions of dollars each year on financial aid alone, there’s a growing concern that students aren’t set up for success after college, and a belief that colleges should be at least partially on the hook for student outcomes.

NASFAA is updating its Staffing and Salary Models via our NASFAA Benchmarking Survey. All Today’s News subscribers should have previously received a direct email from us with a link to a survey. Due to a system error with our survey software, we have extended the deadline to complete this survey to 5:00pm ET, Tuesday, October 25. NASFAA plans to publish a final report with the results of this benchmarking survey in early 2017. Again please refer to your email for the link to the survey.

With the new suggested content features in the updated NASFAA.org, you can easily locate information on topics that interest you. You can search for and sort items a number of ways, and can opt to receive weekly updates on those topics by email. Check out this brief video to learn more about the topics and suggested content features and stay tuned to Today's News for videos about other features.

Congratulations to the third round of winners for NASFAA's 50th Anniversary Trivia Contest. The winners will each receive a NASFAA baseball cap - check out our list of winners on our conference website. Want a chance to win great prizes? Play NASFAA's 50th Anniversary Trivia Contest - trivia questions about NASFAA from 1987-1996 are ready for you to answer now. And stay tuned to Today's News to see if you're a winner.

NASFAA's AskRegs Knowledgebase allows a NASFAA member to subscribe to individual Knowledgebase Q&As he or she has viewed in order to receive any updates to those Q&As. NASFAA occasionally updates Q&As due to changes in the law or regulations or clarifications of U.S. Department of Education (ED) guidance. Clicking "Subscribe" at the bottom of each Q&A that is of interest to you ensures that you will receive an immediate email notification if and when that specific is updated.

This letter announces the availability of two courses in the newly redesigned FSA Coach training suite. Introductory Web-based tutorials on federal student aid program administration are now available for both domestic and foreign schools.

The Department of Education  would like to provide clarification regarding compliance with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (Clery Act).

The Department of Education is pleased to announce the posting of the 2016-2017 EDExpress for Windows Packaging Technical Reference in PDF format on the Federal Student Aid Download (FSAdownload) Web site.

"As calls to simplify the student financial aid process intensify and gain bipartisan support, advocates are hopeful that changes are coming to help more qualified students get through college who couldn’t otherwise afford it," Education Week reports. "The NASFAA recommendations include letting families use two-year-old income data to determine eligibility, rather than previous-year figures—a proposal known as 'prior-prior' year. That would allow students to apply for aid when they apply for college, rather than waiting until spring."

"As the clock ticks toward the end of his presidency and he faces a Republican Congress that is in no mood to cooperate, President Obama will travel outside Washington on Wednesday to kick off a public-relations campaign for his plans to make college more affordable," The New York Times reports.

"... [A] Gallup/Inside Higher Ed poll of college and university presidents has found that half of college presidents back or partly back an early version of Senator Sanders's plan that would provide $18 billion to states to pay for two free years of public higher education (at both two- and four-year institutions)," Inside Higher Ed reports.

"Studies show that prisoners who get access to education behind bars are far less likely to return to prison, are are more likely to land a job once they're released. But few of America's crowded prisons have higher education programs that reach inmates face-to-face," NPR reports.

"Accreditation agencies have been the gatekeepers standing between colleges and millions of dollars in federal financial aid for more than half a century," The Washington Post reports. "But that role is in question after the stunning collapse of Corinthian Colleges."

"Daymar College, the for-profit Kentucky company accused in multiple lawsuits of duping students into enrolling through bogus claims about job placement and transferring credits, has agreed to pay $1.2 million to ex-students, according to a copy of the tentative deal," The Courier-Journal reports.

"As the UW-Madison community settles back into campus life for another school year, thousands of students are facing the possible elimination of one of the oldest federal loan programs in the country," The Daily Cardinal reports.

"When Sharon Sin enrolled at USC three years ago, she didn't sign up for a foreign language course because it wasn't a requirement for her engineering major," the Los Angeles Times reports. "But her sophomore year, Sin switched her focus to social sciences, which has a mandatory three-semester language component. She put off the requirement, thinking that maybe she could pass a placement test that would get her out of taking the classes. Then she received an email notice from USC administrators telling her she had to meet with an academic advisor to discuss the foreign language mandate."

"Caitlin McLawhorn could never have gone to college, she says, without the free tuition she received to attend community college first and to earn an associate's degree," The Atlantic reports. "Growing up as the daughter of a single mother, money was always tight in McLawhorn’s household in East Tennessee."

"The high school students sat around the conference table, their pens poised, listening with rapt attention to advice being served up by Marjada Tucker," according to The Hechinger Report. "It was the fourth meeting of Tucker’s College Readiness Program, a summer institute she created to help students in Mississippi’s Oktibbeha County successfully make the tough transition from high school to college."

"Amid a push to attract more women and minorities to technical industries, female students make up the largest share of this year’s Georgia Institute of Technology freshman class since women first were admitted in 1952," according to The Associated Press. "Black students make up about 7 percent of the freshman class – a 35 percent jump from last year."

"Americans are increasingly concerned about two seemingly unrelated issues: a distressing lack of civic literacy and informed civic engagement in the general public, and the escalating burden of student-loan debt. We could make significant progress on both of those issues with an updated GI Bill," Sheila Suess Kennedy writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

"When Congress passed the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act of 2013, interest rates were on the verge of doubling. Once the legislation was signed into law, however, rates fell, and the sponsoring politicians rushed to take credit for having solved a notorious problem for all time," Mitchell Weiss writes in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "If only that were true."

"My children’s student loans are forgiven…if I die. You heard me right. If I take out a Parent Plus loan and I die the student loans will be forgiven. Unfortunately, this isn’t an attractive financial planning strategy," John Girouard writes for Forbes.

"The clock is running out on a $1 billion, 57-year-old student loan program that helps the very poor," according to Politico's Morning Education. "'You could expand and extend Perkins, and that could be the risk-sharing portion of HEA,' said Justin Draeger, president of [NASFAA}. "'With this Congress, the question is, will they bear the cost?'" he added.

"By all accounts, Ineshia Marsh is a post-grad success story. She graduated in December from Louisiana’s Grambling State University with a degree in computer science, and she found a job soon after as a help-desk technician at Computer Sciences Corporation in Bossier City, Louisiana," Brianna McGurran writes for NerdWallet. "But she’s living with student loan debt that’s higher than her annual income of $35,500. Her first student loan payment came due in August, and she realized she couldn’t afford the $387 she owed every month."

"Albert Gray has probably had better days than June 17. As the executive director of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, or ACICS, Gray heads one of the small nonprofit agencies that the U.S. Department of Education tasks with evaluating higher education institutions to determine which colleges are qualified to offer federal grants and loans to their students," Ben Miller writes for the Center for American Progress. "On that day, Gray had been called before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to talk about ACICS’ role in ensuring quality in postsecondary education."

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