In a yearlong survey, the Government Accountability Office held meetings and interviews with nearly 70 education experts, trade association representatives, researchers and school officials. Participants generally concluded that higher-education regulations as a whole were “costly, vague, complicated or unnecessary.”
One of the most common complaints was the difficulty in calculating how much federal assistance money should be returned to the Department of Education when a student drops out of school early. Survey respondents also cited difficulties in complying with the disclosure requirements for student enrollment, graduation rates, cost of attendance and student crime.
However, the Department of Education told GAO it receives few, if any, comments on how to improve the information collection.
The study examined Department of Education postsecondary-related “information collection requests (ICRs)” — a procedural step in the rulemaking process — that were submitted to White House for approval from August 2006 to October 2012.
Less than one-fourth of all the more than 350 ICRs during that time received public comment — and only 25 addressed burdens placed on schools, the GAO said. The department even offered the public a chance to comment on a retrospective of its current rules, which only received 30 comments. Only nine comments mentioned a “regulatory burden,” the report said.