Without a moment to spare, on Friday, November 1, 2019, the Federal Register shared the release of the long awaited 2019 Final Federal Regulations with the official and concise title: Student Assistance General Provisions, The Secretary’s Recognition of Accrediting Agencies, The Secretary’s Recognition Procedures for State Agencies. These regulations are the final form of the proposed regulations regarding state authorization and accreditation issues released by the Department of Education in June 2019. This is the first of two posts to address the new regulations.
You may recall that we provided analysis of the proposed regulations that were related to State Authorization and also responded to the Department’s request for public comment. In general, we thought that the proposed regulations were an improvement to the 2016 Federal regulations as the new regulations were a result of consensus by the negotiators in the 2019 Negotiated Rulemaking process. Our public comment reflected the questions we had about certain terms for the purpose of regulation implementation as well as a continued need for clarification of the definition of state authorization reciprocity agreement.
In this post, we will review each state authorization related Federal regulation by asking the following questions:
- What does the final regulation say?
- What guidance did WCET and SAN ask of the Department in the public comment?
- How did the Department respond to WCET and SAN’s questions in the preamble of the final regulations?
- What are the implications to the institution for implementation of the regulations?