When the 114th U.S. Congress gets underway this January, Republicans will hold majorities in both the House and the Senate for the first time since 2006. With the shift in leadership, Republicans will now decide which legislation is considered – including bills affecting student loans.

Congress is slated to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, although this process is often delayed. The HEA is the all-encompassing legislation for higher education policy and regulation, including federal student loans. There are a few possibilities of what reauthorization could look like under a GOP-led Congress.

Keep in mind that while Republican senators now have enough votes to pass legislation sent to them from the Republican House and vice versa, the president still has the ability to veto legislation that he finds objectionable, and they still do not have the two-thirds majority needed to overturn a presidential veto.



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This means that controversial legislation not supported by both parties is unlikely to get very far. Instead, the Student Loan Ranger predicts that the following broad themes around student debt, which both parties have put forth in one way or another, are much more likely to end up in the final reauthorization bill:

Better counseling for students and better loan information

The use of interactive tools in counseling that test the user’s knowledge of student loan content

Better information on college cost and loans for prospective college students

A simplification of loan repayment programs

As the House has already been under Republican leadership in recent years, it is expected that Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., will continue as chairman of the Education and Workforce Committee.

In the months leading up to last week’s election, Republicans in the House issued a white paper outlining their reauthorization priorities, which included offering more robust and timely financial information to and expanding financial literacy for all student loan recipients, reducing the existing multiple federal student loans down to just one program and streamlining loan repayment programs into standard repayment and one modified income-based program.

House Republicans also want to eliminate President Barack Obama’s proposed Postsecondary Institution Ratings System that would provide prospective students with information on a higher education institution’s graduation rate, average student debt amounts and other data to help them make better informed decisions on where to attend.



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The House’s pre-election strategy was to take a piecemeal approach to reauthorization by releasing individual bills that address priorities rather than drafting a singular comprehensive bill. To that end, the full House passed two bills related to student loans.

The Empowering Students Through Enhanced Financial Counseling Act requires both students and parents who participate in a federal loan program to receive interactive counseling each year according to their individual borrowing situation. It also calls for the U.S. Department of Education to maintain and disseminate a consumer-tested, online counseling tool institutions can use to provide annual loan counseling.

The Strengthening Transparency in Higher Education Act eliminates the requirement that the U.S. Department of Education make certain data publicly available on the College Navigator website and instead calls for the creation of an online "college dashboard" hat would include institutional data on completion rates, loan debt and repayment rates.

Both bills were sent to the Senate for consideration, but will probably have to be reintroduced in the 114th Congress because they will likely not have been passed by both chambers and signed into law by the president before the end of this legislative session in December. House Republicans have not indicated if they will continue with a piecemeal approach to reauthorization legislation now that the Republicans will also control the Senate, so it’s unclear whether these bills will be reintroduced as is or worked into a broader bill.



Over on the Senate side, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, led by Democratic Chairman Sen. Tom Harkin, has been holding hearings on higher education reauthorization since 2012. This past June, the Iowa senator proposed the Higher Education Affordability Act, a wide-ranging draft of legislation meant to encompass many facets of the Higher Education Act.

The bill called for several changes relevant to student loan borrowers, including streamlined repayment plans and a single income-based repayment option; automatic enrollment into income-based repayment for severely delinquent borrowers; and collection costs that cannot exceed 16 percent of outstanding principal and interest, among other items.