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"Congress must carefully consider and address innovative learning models in the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act and carve out space for colleges and universities to experiment without fear of federal reprisal," NASFAA President Justin Draeger writes in an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed. "It should set parameters around distance education to prevent abuse, and the Education Department should enforce those limitations -- but not to the extent that institutions are scared off from using authorized flexibilities or models that clearly achieve results."

NASFAA members from Virginia and Florida institutions met with congressional staff members on Capitol Hill Thursday to urge lawmakers to extend the Perkins Loan program, protect the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, and find a way to codify the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in law.

Following failed efforts this week to pass bipartisan legislation in Congress, the authority to disburse any new Perkins Loans will expire on September 30; however, schools will still be able to make subsequent disbursements of existing Perkins Loans. This isn’t the first time Perkins has expired, with an extension offered months later. But the pathway this time around appears steeper than ever. While NASFAA will continue to work with coalitions and lawmakers for an extension, even after it has expired, we are also focused on ensuring an orderly, flexible wind-down. Stay tuned to Today's News for additional information.

When it comes to regulations and guidance, there are many nuances that can make certain concepts difficult to understand in different situations. In this series, NASFAA will highlight commonly misunderstood topics, and direct readers to resources that can best address popular questions on each topic. Many financial aid professionals, for example, struggle with the eligibility for and limitations surrounding late disbursements. The following resources from NASFAA's AskRegs Knowledgebase address some of the most common questions.

As work on the FISAP comes to a close, many schools are evaluating the administration of their financial aid programs. This is where the Policies and Procedures (P&P) Builder Module of NASFAA’s Compliance Engine can assist. Under Section 3: Financial Aid Programs, there are subtopics such as Program Eligibility, where schools can upload and store their policies and procedures with explanations or use the template to create necessary policies and procedures for the institution. View this, and the other great features of the NASFAA Compliance Engine.

Since July 2017, Federal Student Aid determined that additional reports required layout changes that were not originally listed in the attachments. On September 28, 2017, the Department updated the attachments to include information about the layout changes for three additional reports. The updated text appears in red and is marked with an asterisk (*).

The Department of Education's federal offices as well as some of its Title IV processors and contact centers will be closed on Monday, October 9, 2017 to observe the Columbus Day federal holiday. See the attachment for the various centers' operation status on the holiday.

"An analysis from Third Way finds a high concentration of graduates who attended programs that failed the gainful-employment rule in just a handful of states," Inside Higher Ed reports.

"When Dustin Gordon's high school invited juniors and seniors to meet with recruiters from colleges and universities, a handful of students showed up," according to The Hechinger Report. "A few were serious about the prospect of continuing their educations, he said. 'But I think some of them went just to get out of class.'"

"In a rec room on the campus of Western Michigan University, 28 current and former foster youth form a line along one wall. It's the first day of their orientation into the college's Seita Scholars program, and the participants are getting to know one another –– and the challenges they face," The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

"The summer gathering of alumni at Antioch College was not your conventional reunion. Sure, there was the enthusiasm of returning classmates and the babble of nostalgic conversation over dinner in a big white tent erected on the campus quad. Then the president convened a town hall-style meeting to discuss the state of the college," according to The Hechinger Report.

"A South Florida lawmaker wants to send Florida students to college for free, as long as they agree to work in the state when they graduate," the Miami Herald reports.

"Economists across the political spectrum agree that the single biggest threat to future job growth is neither immigration nor trade — it's the artificial intelligence revolution already underway. Studies by Oxford University, McKinsey and Pricewaterhouse Coopers forecast that up to 50% of current jobs could be replaced by smart machines within the next 20 years. Already, more than 5 million U.S. factory jobs have been lost to automation since 2000. It's become clear: If a job can be automated in the future, it will be," Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University, writes in an opinion piece for TIME.

"Employing obsolete standards makes no more sense in higher education policy than it does in oenology. Even the Bible notes, to paraphrase, that it's a bad idea to put new wine in old bottles because it will it spoil the wine," Terry Hartle and Dan Madzelan write for The Washington Post.

"The 2018-19 FAFSA season launches Oct. 1, and an old friend is back to help ease the process. The IRS Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) is available once again to help families provide their tax information directly from the IRS. This tool was shut down in March due to security concerns over attempts to access people's data to file fraudulent tax returns, but those issues have been addressed and we are back in business for the 2018-19 FAFSA," The National College Access Network writes in a blog post. NASFAA is mentioned in this article.

"Though the Department of Education released the College Scorecard update [Thursday] morning with little fanfare, users who went to the site were pleasantly surprised by a new feature: a comparison tool that allows prospective students to compare up to 10 different colleges across a whole host of data measures," Clare McCann writes for New America.

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