Apparently congress is looking to regulate higher education by mandating that they spend at least 5% of their endowment each year on tuition.

And buried among the 61 amendments to the Higher Ed Act bill that lawmakers said they would seek to offer on the House floor Thursday was one, offered by Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), that would require colleges, regardless of wealth, to spend at least 5 percent of their endowments each year in ways that would reduce what students pay to attend college.

Welch’s amendment had college officials in a full-fledged tizzy Tuesday. Unlikely amendments of all kinds get offered at this stage of the legislative process all the time, and most of them never see the light of day because the process for offering amendments can be tightly controlled. But several things give Welch’s amendment a solid shot of getting to a vote on the House floor. First, he’s a Democrat, and amendments offered by the party in power tend to get preference. Second, he is a member of the House Rules Committee, which has the power to decide the ground rules for debating each bill and for offering amendments on the floor.

I’m wondering how some of my readers feel about the state telling universities how to spend a portion of their money? Personally I’m vehemently opposed to this kind of state regulation. However some of you are much more happier with state control over other institutions so it should be interesting to see how you respond to university being placed under such control.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 11:41 am and is filed under Regulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.