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New student financial aid rules soon to be enacted by the Department of Education to protect borrowers and taxpayers will not have an impact on students at the University of Maine.
“A whole lot of it doesn’t pertain to us,” said UMaine Student Financial Aid Director Peggy Crawford. “This is kind of the knee jerk [reaction] to people being stupid.”
The new student financial aid rules are designed to protect borrowers from misleading recruiting practices while requiring schools to provide more accurate information on graduation rates and job placement after graduation.
Crawford adds that the rules are aimed at schools that pay admissions employees by commission. These for-profit schools often recruit students without looking at their ability to graduate. The same schools also reported misleading information about graduation rates and job placement within their field of study in order to get potential students to take out a loan and attend classes at that school.
When these students arrived at classes, many were unable to complete the work-load required for graduation and dropped out, leaving them with a large amount of debt. Students who made it to graduation were unable to find work because they were misled about the reality of job placement in their field of study, as many cannot afford to repay loans at that point. Due to these problems the new rules state that universities and other schools are no longer allowed to operate on a per-admission basis.
“In reality, the university has everything in place to deal with these changes already,” Crawford said. “We have never paid admission folks on a per-admission basis.”
Crawford adds that “students here will not see any changes,” in regard to students filing FAFSA information. The new rules are designed to regulate institutions rather than students attending them.
She said the UMaine financial aid department will not have to make any changes to the way it operates, but the department plans to research graduation rates and outcomes.
“We want to know where our graduates go and what they end up doing,” said Crawford. “We are very focused on this sort of information.”
The information gathered through research will be used to help future students at the university.
“This research is in large part not relevant for our current students. It is more for incoming and potential students,” Crawford said.
The data will be used to show potential students what they can do within their fields of study and where alumni work after earning the same degrees.
“We are going to make an all-out effort on the outcome statistics,” Crawford said. “We want this information to be more visible to the students.”
A portion of the new rules will take effect July 1, 2011. The Department of Education allowed for input from educators and the public while drafting the rules. The department received 90,000 comments from the public and 1,200 comments after the initial proposal, which led to 82 revisions to the proposal.
The rules have not been finalized but, barring any major changes, will be finalized and in effect by July 2012.
