House Acts to Overhaul College Loan Regulations

Congress overwhelmingly approved an overhaul of the nation’s higher education law on Thursday, adding dozens of provisions and programs to help families with soaring college costs.

The bill is an effort to keep college costs down through greater transparency — and perhaps shaming — without imposing price controls. It requires colleges and universities to report more information about their costs and prices, to be released by the Education Department in user-friendly lists; those with the largest percentage tuition increases will have to tell the department why they were needed and what they will do to keep costs down.

The measure passed in the House by 380 to 49 and in the Senate by 83 to 8.

The measure also simplifies federal financial-aid forms, and, for the first time, makes Pell grants for low-income students available year-round, not just during the academic year. It also requires colleges to disclose all relationships with student lenders and bans all gifts and revenue-sharing agreements between institutions and lenders offering federal and private loans.

The Senate and House have voted to reauthorize the Higher Education Act and approved controversial new provisions that will require universities to provide students with access to commercial music downloading services and implement traffic filtering technologies in order to deter peer-to-peer filesharing. The bill now goes to President Bush, who is expected to sign it into law.

These provisions have strong support from the content industry, but have been targeted with widespread criticism from the academic community and advocacy groups such as Educause. The push for mandatory filtering at universities began in 2007 when the RIAA published a list of top piracy schools and the MPAA claimed that piracy on university campuses accounts for 44 percent of the movie industry's annual losses to piracy. The group later retracted this claim when it was discovered that the numbers were grossly inflated. The RIAA followed up its top piracy school list with a litigation and propaganda campaign which included the development of a web site to handle automated settlements, but soon faced serious setbacks in court.

The MPAA also developed an Ubuntu-based software toolkit for detecting file-sharing on university networks, but was forced to discontinue distribution of the software when they were hit with a Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown notice. The MPAA had violated copyright law by failing to adhere to the General Public License under which Ubuntu is distributed.