“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds
John Maynard Keynes
The Higher Education Reconciliation Act (HERA) of 2005 opened the door to competency based degrees by stating that
instructional programs that use direct assessment instead of credit or clock hours to measure student learning may qualify as a Title IV-eligible program if the assessment is consistent with the school’s or program’s accreditation.
Since that time, the Department of Education (DOE) has moved extremely tentatively towards approval of competency based degrees, approving only three thus far. Recently we learned that the Inspector General (IG) for the Department of Education has found that the Department's extremely tentative moves towards accepting competency based degrees were not tentative enough:
We found that the Department did not adequately address the risks that schools offering direct assessment programs pose to the Title IV programs and did not establish sufficient processes to ensure that only programs meeting Federal regulatory requirements are approved asTitle IV eligible.
