The AFT, with other higher education groups, has been fighting to retain the "12-hour rule" in current law governing the eligibility of students taking distance-education courses to receive federal student aid. The rule requires eligible students to take at least 12 hours of their weekly college instruction in a classroom, not online. The union believes such a requirement reduces opportunities for fraud and abuse, such as those that were occurring a decade ago with some for-profit institutions.

Various officials of the U.S. Department of Education have expressed a desire to lift the rule, however, in deference to online educators who say it limits "innovation" in the distance-education field. It appears those educators will soon have their way.

In January, the department put together a panel made up of representatives of traditional and non-traditional education institutions, a loan corporation and an accrediting agency. The panel is charged to make recommendations on changing federal student aid policy. Representatives of the higher education associations that usually hold sway in Washington, D.C.--the American Council on Education and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, for example--were denied seats on the panel.

"It's a total outrage," Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, told the Chronicle of Higher Education in February. "The fate of the 12-hour rule is politically decided in advance."

The new order at the department is probably not surprising given the person President Bush appointed to be assistant secretary for postsecondary education. She is Sally Stroup, formerly the chief Washington lobbyist for the Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix. [Barbara McKenna]

April 18, 2002