On November 8, 1965, in a crowded gymnasium at his alma mater Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University), President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 proclaiming, “I want you to go back and say to your children and to your grandchildren, and those who come after you and follow you—tell them we have made a promise to them… And tell them that we have opened the road and we have pulled the gates down and the way is open, and we expect them to travel it.”
Since that fall morning, the HEA has served as the primary federal legislation governing student financial aid and higher education regulation. It has been reauthorized several times – most recently in 2008 – and is several years overdue for reauthorization. And although Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee, and his co-chair Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) have been vocal about their commitment to reauthorizing the act, it was Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, who released the first draft of a bill to reauthorize HEA last Friday.