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What Constitutes a Full-Time Course Load?
Many higher education constituents agree that the way the federal government defines the full-time pursuit of higher education needs to be reconsidered. Currently, the government relies on the "twelve-hour rule," which defines a full-time course load as entailing twelve hours a week of classroom-based instruction, or twelve credit hours. The rule, which was instituted by the 1992 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, is important to both students and institutions, because the federal government uses the full-time designation to calculate students' eligibility for financial aid.
Among its imperfections, the rule does not fit well with the growth of distance education programs, in which students may be enrolled in a number of courses with little or no classroom instructional time. Other kinds of courses, such as service learning, research projects, clinical programs, or workplace-based education, also may not require students to log hours in the classroom.
Congress is aware of the problem and is considering a measure, the Internet Equity and Education Act of 2001, that would cancel the rule. The act would make other changes as well, including the repeal of the "50 percent rule," which specifies that institutions must teach fewer than half of their courses by means of telecommunications devices in order to be considered "higher education institutions" for the purpose of receiving federal financial aid.
The House Education and Workforce Committee approved the act in August, and the full House will consider it in the fall. (It grows out of recommendations made by the Web-based Education Commission, a group of policy makers, members of Congress, educators, and distance education providers established in 1998. For more about the commission and AAUP general secretary Mary Burgan's testimony before it, see page 10 of the November- December 2000 issue of Academe.)
"Although the twelve-hour rule needs to be rethought, Congress should not be too hasty to cancel it without replacing it with another measure," says AAUP government relations director Mark Smith. "The logic behind the rule's creation was to protect the integrity of the instructional programs being offered to students receiving federal student aid, and that is still a concern," he explains. At the heart of the issue, Smith says, is the definition of course work. What do students need to learn to earn a college degree? What constitutes a course? How universal are educators' expectations for the level and the breadth of course work across institutional and regional boundaries?
Some groups have already begun to explore these questions. The Institute for Higher Education Policy, for example, has undertaken a study of the uses of and possible alternatives to the credit-hour system. In 2002, when the Higher Education Act is up for reauthorization, the study will have yielded results. Instead of creating chaos now by setting aside current definitions of a full-time course load, the government should wait until the study produces results and take them into account in future legislation, Smith says.
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