Washington
While a bill to curb tuition growth has drawn strong protests from academe, a little-noticed provision in the same legislation could cause just as much harm to higher education, say college leaders.

At issue is a proposal that would dictate the criteria colleges use in determining whether to accept academic credits for courses transfer students took at their former institutions.

The legislation, introduced last fall in the U.S. House of Representatives, states that a college must base its transfer decisions on whether a student's previous courses are equivalent in content to those that the college offers, and whether the student completed such courses at its "required level of proficiency."

Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, the California Republican who heads the principal House subcommittee on higher education, says that he added that provision because colleges have been using arbitrary standards, such as an institution's type of accreditation, to determine which courses are creditworthy.

Leaders of for-profit higher education have complained for years that traditional colleges have refused to grant credit for courses at proprietary institutions because they are accredited by national agencies, not regional groups.

"Such territorial or political practices are harming students, and must not continue," Mr. McKeon said in a speech on the House floor in October, when he introduced the bill. He noted that students must pay extra tuition or take out additional student loans to make up for credits they have lost.

The bill would also bar colleges from rejecting transfer students solely because the students first attended institutions that were accredited by national agencies.

Higher-education officials say that the government has no right to tell colleges how to award their own credits.

The bill "represents an unprecedented federal intrusion on the academic autonomy of colleges and universities," wrote Jerome H. Sullivan, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, in a letter last month to Mr. McKeon.

"Historically, the federal government has wisely allowed colleges and universities to autonomously determine the terms and conditions their students must meet to earn various academic degrees," Mr. Sullivan wrote. "Your proposed legislation would, for the first time, create a new federal mandate on a fundamentally academic issue."

'Second-Guess' Decisions

College administrators are particularly alarmed that the bill would allow program reviewers and auditors at the U.S. Department of Education "to second-guess academic judgments about course-equivalencies," Mr. Sullivan wrote.

He noted that making transfer-of-credit decisions is "a complex and deliberate process" of placing students in courses for which they have the necessary prerequisites. By "doing away with the subtleties of credit evaluation," he said, the legislation could "cause many students to be misplaced in courses for which they are not academically prepared."

Nancy B. Broff, general counsel of the Career College Association, which represents for-profit institutions, says she understands some of the concerns with the bill. But Ms. Broff says that higher-education lobbyists have only themselves to blame for the predicament they are in now.

"We have been trying for five years to work with the traditional community on the transfer-of-credit issue, and they gave it lip service, but never really dealt with it," she says. "Now they are reaping the rewards of their own intransigence."

Even so, she says that her association would be willing to work with the other groups to develop a proposal that "would be more palatable to the rest of the community" but that still deals with for-profit colleges' concerns.

Mr. McKeon responds that he too is willing to sit down with registrars and admissions officers to discuss their worries.

"It's always good to talk to people out on the firing line to hear what's going on," says Mr. McKeon. "I don't know everything by far."

However, he says he is determined "to see that the abuses of transfer of credit are eliminated."