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NASFAA submitted comments on Monday concerning borrower defense procedural rules issued on January 19, the last day of the Obama administration. The January final rule was issued independent of the normal negotiation and public comment processes, and became effective immediately. The Department of Education (ED) stated that those processes need not be applied in the case of procedural rules that do not contain substantive policy changes, but nevertheless invited comment through March 20. The procedural rules support "borrower defense to repayment" regulations issued last November. NASFAA's comments on the proposed rules that led to the November final rules encompassed questions on procedure that ED addressed in the November package.

This morning, JoEllen Soucier, executive director of financial aid for the Houston Community College System, and Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, vice-provost of enrollment management at the University of California–Los Angeles, will appear before the Education and the Workforce’s Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development in a hearing on improving federal student aid to better meet the needs of students. Tune into the live webcast at 10:00 am ET and keep an eye on tomorrow's edition of Today's News for a recap of the hearing.

Next Tuesday March 28, Inceptia will host a webinar discussing the issues and challenges facing financial aid offices in 2017. NASFAA member Justin Chase Brown, director of scholarships and financial aid at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, will host the discussion. The webinar will cover how enrollment management and financial aid intersect, how data influences the financial aid office, how offices can use social media to better serve students and families, how to better communicate "across generational divides," and how the current political climate may impact financial aid and higher education. The webinar will run from 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm ET.

While NASFAA’s Policies & Procedures (P&P) Builder enables you to work collaboratively with colleagues in your office and in others across campus, you may not want your entire roster to be able to see in-progress work. When creating or maintaining your manuals, you can determine if items are private, or if all staff can view your items. In both settings, only the owner and assignees can make edits, so the owner maintains control of changes. Find out more at www.nasfaa.org/engine.

This demonstration study will evaluate the use of a promising messaging strategy designed to help TRIO Educational Opportunity Center (EOC) grantees meet the program's goal of increasing college enrollment.

"Leigh-Ellen Keating, who directs international services for Brock University, in Ontario, just attended a student recruiting fair in Mexico. 'The table was flooded with people, which is not historically what I have seen with the Mexican market,' she said. 'They just want to go to Canada, and historically I think a lot of them would go to the States,'" Inside Higher Ed reports. "'It didn't hurt,' Keating continued, that the recruitment fair coincided with an anti-Trump rally in front of the hotel where the fair was held. She suspects some of the rally participants might have popped over to check out college options in Canada."

"The biggest story of our week happened early Thursday morning when President Trump released his budget outline, historically known as a 'skinny budget' because it has few details," NPR reports. "The U.S. Department of Education came in for a $9 billion, or 13.5 percent, cut."

"California legislators are taking on a whale: giving hundreds of thousands of students pathways to debt-free college," Pacific Standard Magazine reports.

"When it comes to paying for college, Ricardo Gutierrez receives about the best help that Texas has to offer," The Texas Tribune reports. "Still, it sometimes feels like his future at the University of Houston is hanging by a thread."

"The cost of a college degree may be going up for California students. But a study by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) said the amount of money spent on each degree by the University of California and California State University systems has been going down, when adjusted for inflation," KPBS reports.

"A long, slow decline in both state funding and enrollment has public colleges in Illinois cutting staff and increasing tuition. In the face of a financial shortfall, it would seem campuses would seek out every dollar available," St. Louis Public Radio reports. "But Western Illinois University and Southern Illinois University are trying a different tactic. They're eliminating higher out-of-state tuition rates so any undergrad from any state will pay what used to be the lower in-state tuition."

"The Trump administration has made numerous proclamations about recapturing or preserving traditional manufacturing jobs in an effort to shrink the US trade deficit and make America great again," according to Quartz. "Most are populist cries to bolster old industries, such as automobile manufacturing, that purportedly have been ravaged by unfair global competition. It' too bad we romanticize businesses lost to progress and ignore vibrant sectors in which the US is still justifiably great and even dominant. 'Like what?' you may ask. How about higher education?"

"As colleges nationwide prepare to announce this month which applicants they have decided to accept, it's worth asking why so many admissions offices pass up easy opportunities to admit higher-quality students," Devin Pope, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, writes for The New York Times.

"With barely more than 200 words devoted to higher education in its new budget proposal, the Trump administration manages to take us on a brief but dizzying journey through the looking glass to a place where cuts of billions of dollars to a crucial grant program for low-income students can be called 'safeguarding' and reductions of hundreds of millions of dollars in other valuable supports for underserved students can somehow be reconciled with protecting minority students," according to the Center for American Progress.

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