Going Back to the Drawing Board: Re-Entrenching the Higher Education Act to Restore Its Historical Policy of Access

This article explores both the historical entrenchment of the Higher Education Act (“HEA” or “the Act”) and ongoing attempts to retrench it. In it, I argue that Congress should return the HEA to its historical roots and enact reauthorizing legislation that will set the course for re-entrenching the Act and its historical policy. This re-entrenching will properly set the focus of the Act on providing widespread higher education access by creating and implementing new pathways (funding and otherwise) to that access. In the article, I discuss the entrenchment of the HEA into American culture in an effort to understand the historical view of United States’ society toward government funded higher education. I also discuss the ongoing retrenchment of the HEA by exploring, in the context of all HEA reauthorizations, presidential and congressional fiscal policies regarding post-secondary education. Discussing this history simultaneously proves the retrenchment of the HEA’s historical access policy and the importance of preserving a definition of access that balances maintenance of existing pathways to post-secondary education with the necessity for creating new ones. I discuss the changing higher education landscape (focusing on for-profit post-secondary institutions) to validate the need for protecting federal funds, but to also demonstrate how that need for protection has overshadowed the historical policy of widespread post-secondary access. Finally, in anticipation of the next HEA reauthorization, I urge Congress to begin re-entrenching the Act by returning its primary focus to creation and implementation of new access programming and suggest methods by which it might accomplish this goal