Yesterday, President Obama visited Northern Virginia Community College to sign the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, shorthanded by lawmakers as “SAFRA.”

One reason the President signed the bill at a community college is to underscore that the new law includes $2 billion to improve educational and career training programs at community colleges. These 2-year schools can be a smart alternative for students and their families who are looking to save money, but attain an associate’s degree, or stay on path to a bachelor’s.

Nevertheless, four-year schools get ever more costly and the bill does nothing to directly address the high cost of college, through previously discussed methods such as price controls or penalties to schools for raising their prices above certain levels.

For instance, the bill authorizes $36 billion for the Pell Grant program, increasing the maximum award for the next academic year to $5550 and, beginning in 2013, indexing increases in Pell Grant to the cost of living. Pell Grants are the “foundation” student aid program, meaning that students must first utilize a Pell Grant before any other need-based financial aid is awarded.

According to supporters of the bill, this new money became available for Pell Grants due to savings that were made by the elimination of Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program and the conversion of all federal student loans to the Federal Direct Student Loan (FDSL) program, administered by the U.S. Department of Education. Supporters of the bill noted that elimination of the FFEL program and originating all new loans in the FDSL program will yield a net savings of $61 billion over the next 10 years.

One other use of this savings will be to place an additional $1.5 billion into income-based repayment for student loans. Starting in 2014, new borrowers will be able to cap their student loan payments at just 10 percent of their adjusted gross income.

Despite the passage of “SAFRA,” the fact remains that college costs continue to go up, with many selective private schools already announcing tuition increases of more than 4%, and many state schools looking at double-digit percentage increases.

College Parents of America’s mission is to help parents understand, prepare for, protect and maximize their family’s college investment. With the cost of college continuing to rise, and this dramatic action by Congress barely making a dent in the price for the average family, we are proud to be working with GradGuard (www.gradguard.com), a service of Next Generation Insurance Group, in offering the first national group policy for tuition insurance.

The purchase of tuition insurance can go a long way toward bringing families some peace of mind when it comes to the college investment. As the cost of college continues to rise, college refund policies are getting stricter. A typical situation is that a school will not refund any tuition or fees after the beginning of the 5th week of a semester. With tuition insurance from GradGuard, a member of College Parents of America can file a claim for the loss incurred should a student have to withdraw from school for a medical reason.

Learn more about standard membership in College Parents of America, which includes $5,000 in tuition insurance coverage.

“Administrators promoting parent involvement” is not just a headline. It is the name of a group of dedicated professionals at colleges and universities who run what are usually called “parent relations” offices at these institutions.

So when Administrators Promoting Parent Involvement (APPI) gather today at their annual meeting in Boston, they will be doing so with your interests in mind and at heart. Of all of the offices at a college or university, and schools have many, it is the offices that these professionals run which regard you – the parent – as the key “customer” in a symbiotic relationship.

The admission office wants your enrollment contract, and the bursar’s office wants your money, but the parent relations office wants your feedback. Their job is to serve you, to learn your concerns, and to communicate those concerns to the proper channels at the university.

Because they are professionals, however, these individuals make “professional judgments” in the course of doing their job. Sometimes, that may mean saying “no” to your request to get involved in a roommate dispute or an academic question. Parent relations pros know that such issues are better resolved by the student or, if resolution is not possible, then at least they will be a student learning experience.

Do you interact with the parents relations office at your son or daughter’s school? How do you rate your experience? Please share your thoughts with us below.

If you’ve been following the health care reform debate closely over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that the elongated process has fostered some strange bedfellows – student loans and reconciliation.

Now, as the proposed legislative action appears to draw to a close, you may have also paid enough attention to the mainstream press to sort of understand why reconciliation is being used to push through health care reform. You may agree or disagree with the proposed reforms, and you may agree or disagree with the use of reconciliation, but you probably see why President Obama and congressional Democratic leaders have chosen this particular route to passage. In short, it’s the only route to passage.

But you still may have a nagging question in the back of your mind: what in the world do student loans have to do with health care reform?

The answer lies within that mysterious process of reconciliation, where it seems all legislative roads must lead. According to the Senate parliamentarian (who right now may be the most powerful person in Washington), there is an immovable threshold that health care reform must cross in order for reconciliation to be utilized: $1 billion in deficit savings from both the Senate Finance Committee, and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee over the next 10 years.

As reported in POLITICO, “With health care alone, the HELP Committee would not be able to show that the items within its jurisdiction save at least $1 billion.”

Therefore, the “savings” from student loan reform are necessary to push health care reform over this arbitrary threshold. I put “savings” in quotes and call it an arbitrary threshold because I fail to be convinced that student loan reform will result in savings at all for the federal government.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), who supports a combining of the two measures, phrased it deliciously when explaining why. The student loan reform package, he told POLITICO, “gives more buoyancy” to the overall bill.

Somehow, the image I see from “buoyancy” doesn’t connote savings to me. Instead, it signals a marriage of convenience: those who may not be totally sold on health care reform can say “but in the end I had to vote for college students and their ability to pay for college.” Or, the mirror image might be true. A skeptic on student loan reform (and there are many) might be heard to say this weekend: “We can no longer let people in this country go without health insurance.”
The bottom line is that many members of Congress, for strong philosophical reasons, either support or oppose both health care and student loan reform. They are not affected by this parliamentary maneuver because they would have voted the same way anyway.

However, there are enough members of Congress who are torn about what to do on health care reform, or student loan reform, or both, and reconciliation provides them some political cover to try to better explain how they voted to their constituents. It’s murky enough to allow them to have it both ways, to have their legislative cake and eat it too.

The core of student loan reform would be to end the subsidies given to private lenders who distribute student-loan money and instead require all colleges to use the Education Department’s own direct-lending system. That may – or may not – be a cure for the ills of higher education, but it is certainly a short-term Rx for health care reform.

What do you think about all this legislative maneuvering? Share your views on Hoverings: A Blog for Current and Future College Parents, located on the home page of www.collegeparents.org. Thank you for your continuing interest in College Parents of America.

As college student affairs administrators gather in Chicago for their annual convention, they are coming to grips with a whole new generation of individuals invading their campuses.

I’m not talking about a new generation of students, but a transitioning generation of parents. Very soon, the so-called “Gen Xers,” those born between 1961 and 1981 will be the dominant group of college parents. That’s right, college parents.

Think about it and do the math. The oldest GenXers are turning 49 years old this year. Even if they waited until their 30s to have children, then those students are now becoming college-aged.

Over the past two years, the University of Minnesota has looked at the age range of its parents and saw a one-year jump from 14% Gen Xers to 24% Gen Xers. As that trend continues, and is felt on other college campuses, it won’t take long for these Gen Xers to be the dominant group of college parents.

Now, of course, in some ways baby-boomer parents have been doing a trial run for what colleges and universities may expect to see in GenX parents.

Baby boomers emerged from the wreckage of the 60s and 70s as the most college-educated generation themselves, and that raised their level of expectations when it comes to college for their children. These baby boomer (and I am one) parents were also largely left alone by their own parents, and that has resulted in a boomerang effect, with these neglected boomers holding on tight to their own children as they progressed from kindergarten through college.

Well, colleges are discovering that GenXers are even more college-educated than boomers and that they were even more left alone as children, becoming the core of what were known as the “latch-key kids.”

These strands of similarities, coupled with the differences that GenXers uniquely lay claim to, make for a compelling case that when it comes to involved parenting styles, colleges “ain’t seen nothing yet” when it comes to GenXers.

These GenX parents have been demanding accountability from the K-12 system for years, and now they will be doing the same of colleges.

These GenX parents have been closely monitoring the lives of their children for years, and it may be much harder for them to let go when it comes to college.

These GenX parents are embracing of new technology, so colleges won’t be able to send out a quarterly print newsletter or put items on their website that have already been made available through other channels.

GenX parents want news about their children delivered unvarnished and without delay. They are more disciplined than boomers, but also less forgiving. As one parent professional put it, they are not so much “helicoptering,” but rather they are “lurking.”

Are you a baby-boomer or a GenXer? If a boomer, what advice can you pass on to your GenX brethren? If a GenXer, what do you want to change about the way that colleges treat parents? Share your thoughts by commenting here.

What does accountability in higher education mean to you?

That is a question that you should be grappling with, and beginning to answer, if you are the parent of an aspiring college student.

And, if you are the parent of a college freshman or upperclassman, then it is a question for which you should have formulated an answer.   You should also be thinking about how to communicate the thrust of that answer to your child and, if possible, to officials at the school your child attends or will be attending.

Heavy stuff, you may be thinking to yourself.

Important stuff, too, I say to you.

It’s important because the role that you can play as individual parents in defining accountability in higher education may be the most important collective role that we as a group can play over the next twenty years.

If we as parents decide that accountability in higher education means what it has for the past twenty years, then we have only ourselves to blame if costs continue to go up, if graduation rates remain spotty and if the meaning of an undergraduate degree starts to become marginalized in the career marketplace.

But if we as a group decide that accountability in higher education means that school finance offices must account for every dollar spent, that school academic affairs offices must explain every course taken and that school career planning offices must justify the return on investment of coursework and degree-granting programs, then we may have ourselves to thank for creating an atmosphere where the education our kids receive is as grounded in the real world as it is eye-opening to new worlds.

I am not suggesting some sort of groupthink, or that every parent should agree on some very narrow definition of accountability.  Yet I am suggesting that what has passed for accountability in the past, simply will not work in the future.

It is not accountability when colleges and universities graduate students who are financially illiterate, grammatically challenged and, in a flat world, linguistically limited or culturally unaware.

It is not accountability when the issuance of a some students’ diplomas are held up if campus parking tickets are unpaid, but expedited when a new degree-granting program needs examples of “results,” even though the curriculum behind such a program may be far from finished in its construction.

And it is not accountability when the constituents at the accountability-defining table include every component of the higher education family, except those who have molded the students into young adults and those who are paying a significant portion of the higher education bill, namely us. . .the parents.

It is accountability when. . .well, I’ve already shared some of my thoughts on the answer, but my views are not nearly as important as yours. Please share your comments on what  accountability should mean in higher education, as I look forward to receiving your views — from whatever angle you choose and from whatever vantage point you occupy.