Higher Education Quick Takes

McGraw-Hill Education on Friday announced it had acquired the adaptive learning company Area9, 13 months after the academic publisher purchased a 20 percent stake. The two companies have partnered to provide adaptive learning technology since 2007, for example through the publisher's LearnSmart series. In 2013, McGraw-Hill also acquired the ALEKS Corporation, another adaptive learning company.

The Education Department on Friday announced the negotiators who will hammer out new rules for PLUS loans, campus debit cards, state authorization for distance programs and other topics on the administration’s sweeping second-term regulatory agenda.

The negotiated-rulemaking panel will convene for the first time on February 19 and meet several times over the next several months to address a range of regulations for institutions that receive federal student aid and the companies the handle the disbursement of that money.

Among the more contentious issues the panel will focus on are the eligibility requirements for obtaining a PLUS loan. Consumer advocates and some think tanks have called for tighter eligibility requirements while some historically black and for-profit colleges, whose students and their families rely heavily on the loans, have said the department’s efforts to tighten the underwriting criteria have already cut off college access for low-income and underserved students.

The panel will also attempt to draft rules for student debit cards and other financial products on campus through which students receive disbursements of their federal loans and grants. Advocacy groups, lawmakers and other federal agencies have questioned the lucrative arrangements that some debit card providers have with colleges to offer such products.

In addition, the negotiated-rulemaking committee will also seek to rewrite the department’s state authorization rule for distance education programs. The rule, which required colleges providing distance education to obtain permission to operate from every state in which they enroll students, was thrown out by a federal appeals court in 2012. The panel will also tackle the conversion of clock hours to credit hours when awarding credit, and rules governing when a student can receive federal aid for repeated coursework.

Following are the list of negotiators:

Carney McCullough, U.S. Department of Education

Pam Moran, U.S. Department of Education

Chris Lindstrom, higher education program director, U.S. Public Interest Research Group

*Maxwell John Love, vice president, United States Student Association

Whitney Barkley, staff attorney, Mississippi Center for Justice

Toby Merrill, director, Project on Predatory Student Lending, The Legal Services Center, Harvard Law School

Suzanne Martindale, staff attorney, Consumers Union

Carolyn Fast, special counsel, Consumer Frauds and Protection Bureau, New York Attorney General’s Office

*Jenny Wojewoda, assistant attorney general, Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office

David Sheridan, director of financial aid, School of International & Public Affairs, Columbia University

*Paula Luff, associate vice president of financial aid DePaul University

Gloria Kobus, director of student accounts & university receivables, Youngstown State University

*Joan Piscitello, treasurer, Iowa State University

David Swinton, president, Benedict College

*George French, president, Miles College

Brad Hardison, financial aid director, Santa Barbara City College

*Melissa Gregory, chief enrollment services and financial aid officer, Montgomery College

Chuck Knepfle, financial aid director, Clemson University

*J. Goodlett McDaniel, associate provost for distance education, George Mason University

Elizabeth Hicks, executive director, student financial services, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

*Joe Weglarz, executive director, student financial services, Marist College

Deborah Bushway, chief academic officer and vice president of academic innovation, Capella University

*Valerie Mendelsohn, vice president, compliance and risk management , American Career College

Casey McGuane, chief operations officer, Higher One

*Bill Norwood, chief architect and director, Heartland Payment Systems

Russ Poulin, deputy director, research and analysis, WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies

*Marshall Hill, executive director, National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements

Dan Toughey, president, TouchNet

*Michael Gradisher, vice president of regulatory and legal affairs, Pearson Embanet

Paul Kundert, president and CEO, University of Wisconsin Credit Union

*Tom Levandowski, senior company counsel, Wells Fargo Bank Law Department, Consumer Lending & Corporate Regulatory Division

Leah Matthews, executive director, Distance Education and Training Council

*Elizabeth Sibolski, president Middle States Commission on Higher Education

(Asterisk denotes alternate.)

Loyola University New Orleans on Friday laid off 18 non-faculty employees as part of a plan to deal with a deficit caused by much lower than expected freshman enrollment in the fall, The Times-Picayune reported. In addition, the university announced that the contracts of 12 non-tenured faculty members would not be renewed.

Newspapers in Texas are reporting that Francisco Cigarroa will today announce that he is stepping down as chancellor of the University of Texas System. A surgeon and a medical professor before rising through administration, Cigarroa reportedly will become the head of the pediatric surgery unit at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Cigarroa has been chancellor since 2009. In recent years he has been under (and resisted) intense pressure from some members of the Board of Regents who are close to Governor Rick Perry, a Republican, to fire Bill Powers as president of the flagship campus at Austin. Powers has been defended by many students, faculty members and alumni.