Now California has school licensing again!

With less than 7 hours to go, the governor signed the bill earlier this Sunday evening. http://gov.ca.gov/press-release/13564/

You can read the legislative analysis and the full text here: http://tinyurl.com/ygwl8ga

Now, let the analyses begin.

 

Here's my impression - originally posted at the time the bill was enrolled and sent to the Governator:

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The part of AB48 that's of most relevance to Degreeinfo is a ways down, commencing at section 94800 with -

CHAPTER 8. PRIVATE POSTSECONDARY INSTITUTIONS

Skimming through it, here's a few highlights that caught my layman's eye...

The former BPPVE has been renamed and refocused as the BPPE, the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education.

Institutions that were already approved when the former law expired will have three additional years added after the scheduled expiration date of that approval.

And there's this...

The provisions on approval exemptions, beginning with section 94874, are worth reading.

The religious exemption seem to be essentially unchanged. Exempt degree programs must award degrees with explicitly religious degree-titles (M.Div, D.Min. etc.) and the program subjects must be the doctrines and practices of religion. Extending religious exemptions to programs in the natural sciences is expressly forbidden.

The former section that made WASC-accredited RA programs exempt is still in there. But this seemingly inconsistent section has been added to it as well, probably as one of the bill's amendments -

So the University of Phoenix got what it wanted and will be allowed to operate in California without regulation by the state.

There's an exemption for non-RA schools with US Dept. of Education recognized accreditation as well, but that exemption has been loaded with so many conditions that I expect few schools will be able to qualify for it. The school must have been in operation in California continuously for at least 25 years, be non-profit, have a satisfactory loan-default rate, meet various financal solvency conditions, and more.

There's a rather amazing section concerning the BPPE's website and the tremendously expanded information on each school that they are directed to provide on it --

The Fact Sheets are kind of a cool idea, assuming that the information that they will contain is reliable. (There's going to be all kinds of attempts to finesse this one.) -

If a school is too new to have compiled the required data, it must inform prospective students that it's untested.

Apparently the intention is that the new BPPE be funded by fees paid by the regulated community. Those fees include -

An Application fee for an approval to operate: five thousand dollars ($5,000). An Application fee for the approval to operate a new branch of the institution: three thousand dollars ($3,000). Renewal fee for the main campus of the institution: three thousand five hundred dollars ($3,500). Renewal fee for a branch of the institution: three thousand dollars ($3,000). Each institution is also required to pay an annual Institutional fee equal to three-quarters of one percent of the institution's annual revenues derived from students in California, but not exceeding a total of twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000) annually. (I can already see the dodgier DL schools limiting the number of in-state students they enroll.) There's also an annual branch fee of one thousand dollars ($1,000) for each branch or campus of the institution operating in California.

The provisions on enforcement are worth reading too, since this has always been the Achilles heel of the approval system. These provisions are found at --

Article 18. Compliance, Enforcement, Process, and Penalties

Commencing with section 94932.

There are provisions for both announced and unannounced site-visits. If any violation of state law or regulations are discovered, citations will be issued.

For the really bad actors, there's this --

 

So then.......

1. Who will be the first unaccredited school to register/apply as prescribed by the new "BPPE" law?

-and-

2. Who will be the first unaccredited school to leave California?

-and-

3. What unaccredited school (not grandfathered already) will stay put in California and do absolutely nothing?

 

A big day!

I worked at BPPVE for a few years, but left for another agency when it began to be sunset. During my last year, I was responsible for reviewing applications for religious exempt institutions. It was pretty challenging, as we had no accompanying regulations with which to plug up the loopholes in the one applicable statute. I remember several run-ins with schools trying to pass secular degrees off as religious, just by rebranding them. "Masters of Church Business Administration" was one of my favorites.

The new fee structure looks very robust. BPPVE used to have a sliding fee structure. An application for a degree-granting institution would range from $3800 to $4500, depending on the size of the new school. Branch apps were very low-cost. So any school starting from scratch would naturally qualify for the lowest fees, yet cost us the most time and resources.

After the grand opening, I hope the legislature and DCA are prepared to follow up with things that were missing from BPPVE, such as

a) updated regulations (ours were from 1996 and were usually only updated on an emergency basis); and
b) personnel, including an attorney, to conduct cite and fines, file court documents and pursue degree mills.

 

Thanks for the detailed analysis, Bill and Pam. You saved me from having to read it until I have more time and provided some additional analysis...

Does anyone have any thoughts on how this new bill compares to the "old" storied CA State Approval system?

(I ask because there has always been this undercurrent of sentiment suggesting that CA State Approved schools were less rigorous than DETC schools could be or are now. In many cases that sentiment could have been accurate. However, some of the better CA State Approved schools might be better thought of as non-standard rather than substandard.)

 

California appproved schools

Hello, Could someone please post a link of the schools that are now considered California approved schools? Thanks. Hille

 

Maybe this is the list - but probably out of date - it will probably be some time before the list is updated or a new one issued.
http://www.bppve.ca.gov/forms_pubs/voluntaryagreelist.pdf

 

Any insight on what this means for the law schools that the CBE picked up oversight on?

 

I'm curious what happened to the rest of the BPPVE people. (Just in general, not necessarily specific individuals.) Are they still with the DCA or still employed by the state? If so, do you think that many of them will be willing to return to the new BPPE?

What I'm really wondering is whether the state has a core of available people who are already experienced and up-to-speed on these educational regulatory matters, or whether Sacramento will have to hire/transfer-in a bunch of absolute newbies and then train them from step one. (And who would there be to train them?)

In the current interregnum there's an ayurvedic "medicine" school active out there that insists that this is a traditional Indian religious practice (and hence exempt) and provides its students with "ordinations" to "prove" it. But the whole marketing presentation revolves about "clinical" this-and-that and prominently features white coats.

I thought that was kind of pushing things a little bit.

It looks to me like they are supposed to write new regulations and have until the end of 2010 to do it. I suppose that they can use the old regs as their model, but it really is an opportunity to update things and to address whatever weaknesses and loopholes had turned up in the old regime. But that in turn presupposes that the people who are writing the new regulations have some clue what they are doing.

Over in Hawaii Jeffrey Brunton proved what one attorney can accomplish when he's bull-dog determined and unafraid of going to court. He obtained a huge stack of court orders and the countless HI mills scattered to the four winds.

Unfortunately, that looks like a real weakness in the new BPPE. If it takes a court-order to shut down a mill and if the BPPE doesn't have access to a legal staff of its own (or access to one resident in the DCA) and is dependent on forwarding cases to the state attorney general, then nothing much is likely to happen.

That's why I kind of expect that the BPPE's ultimate tool might turn out to be its expanded website. It will be hard for mills to claim that they are legitmate California universities when their legal status is made crystal clear and when their every violation is displayed to the public in graphic detail.

 

Who's what & where

Most BPPVE employees moved on to other agencies. Some took positions within DCA, and of those, a few have acted as BPPVE's "transition team" - answering phone and email inquiries, periodically updating the website, etc. So far, I haven't heard of anybody who might apply to work for the new bureau. But it's still very early.

 

Do we know what has become of Sheila Hawkins? When I was more involved in this stuff, you and she seemed to be the two voices of sanity coming from Sacramento.