Western Governors University enjoys full accreditation by the same agencies that rate top-tier collegiate institutions; it has been praised by two U.S. presidents as a beacon for innovation in education and has graduated more than 80,000 students in its 20-year history. Yet, a federal audit says it has to repay more than $700 million in financial aid to students because it has failed to meet some technical requirements set forth before WGU launched its unique approach to online education.
The audit report and its demand for an outsized repayment seems like a heavy-handed swipe by an out-of-touch part of the education bureaucracy adrift in its own sea of arcane rules and regulations. WGU has said it will formally challenge the findings of the audit, and it expects the U.S. Education Department, after a 30-day comment period, will absolve the school from the recommendations made by the department’s Office of Inspector General.
That would be the appropriate course of action if it is indeed the desire of the federal government to encourage innovation in higher education that implements “promising practices that offer breakthroughs in cost, quality, or both,” as former President Barack Obama said of WGU in 2013.
Unfortunately, the reports of the hefty repayment toll recommended in the audit may already have brought reputational damage to WGU. In truth, it’s the education department that should suffer embarrassment for allowing such a specious investigation to proceed to the point of a conclusion that serves as an example of draconian bureaucratic overreach.
Auditors focused on rules that govern online correspondence courses that were put into place in another era — an era in which the word "correspondence course" was still used and the technological tools that allow WGU and other institutions to offer top-notch curricula via the internet had yet to be realized. Former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who played a key role in the creation of WGU, aptly described the audit as “a sneak attack by the past on the future.”
If there is a silver lining in this affair it’s the possibility it will stir the education department and Congress to look at statutory changes that will take the 1992 laws that provide the basis for the audit and bring them into contemporary relevance.
The evolution of WGU has not proceeded without some hiccups, as one may expect in an endeavor aimed at doing business in a different way. That institution and all that accept federal financial assistance should certainly be subject to appropriate regulations. Appropriate, however, means keeping up with modern practices and not creating an unnecessary impediment to improving the nation’s delivery system for knowledge and vocational qualification.