Stop, Drop, and Measure Institutional Outcomes

2008 was a big year for expanding consumer disclosure and reporting requirements—meaning burden— in higher education. While increasing transparency was a theme during the lead up to HEOA, so was reducing regulatory burden. Yet the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act not only extended the Clery Act’s campus safety reporting requirements to cover off-campus residences, it also enacted the Campus Fire Safety Right-to Know Act. This legislation called for institutions to collect and report information related to fire safety to the feds and current and prospective students, adding to the load of consumer disclosures that colleges and other experts cite as the most burdensome category of reporting requirements.

Like other campus safety legislation, the impetus behind this law was a tragic event. The inception of the Campus Fire Safety Right-to Know Act can be traced to the infamous Boland Hall fire at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, which occurred in the early morning hours of January 19, 2000. At around 4 AM, two freshmen students set alight a paper banner in the third floor student lounge as a prank. As the blaze spread to the couch on which the paper banner lay, the two students fled the scene rather than warning others. The fire killed 3 students and injured 58 others.

A shocking, bold-faced tragedy like the one that occurred at Boland Hall certainly galvanizes lawmakers and advocates to action. Yet complacency and failure to act when lives are not in immediate danger would be a mistake.

The investigation that followed revealed disturbing lapses in fire safety on campus. The school was cited with more than 800 violations, including missing fire extinguishers and obstructed exit doors. There had also been frequent false fire alarms (18 since the start of the school year) due to student pranks. This was cited as an important factor that slowed the evacuation of the building. According to witnesses, some students could be heard yelling, “It’s real this time.” Other survivors recalled not wanting to go outside in the cold early morning hours before final examinations, reasoning that it was just another false alarm.

Additionally, Boland Hall lacked sprinklers that would likely have extinguished the fire before it got out of control. However, the dorm was not out of compliance at the time of the incident because building codes did not require older structures to be retrofitted with sprinklers.

In response to the fire, the campus administration’s stance—and that of state lawmakers—changed dramatically. Harsh penalties were enacted for students who pulled a fire alarm as a prank, smoking was banned in dorms, and there was an increased focus on training students and staff on fire safety. Within six months of the events, New Jersey also passed a first-in-the-nation law requiring residential colleges and high schools to install fire sprinklers in all their buildings by 2004 and providing $90 million in funding to do so.

Federal lawmakers reacted to the fire as well. Sen. Robert Torricelli and Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr., both New Jersey Democrats, first introduced the Campus Fire Safety Right-to-Know Act in 2000 a few months after the Boland Hall fire. The bill was reintroduced in the following years by congressmen from New Jersey, but without an overarching reauthorization bill to tie it to, the bill failed to go anywhere.

In 2008, lawmakers finally reauthorized HEA, and the case for the NJ-introduced reporting requirements had gained significant support from fire and campus safety advocacy groups. New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell, one of the bill’s sponsors, thanked the advocacy groups in a press release following the bill’s passage in the House, saying, “I also thank Ed Comeau and Campus Firewatch for their dedication in helping to move this resolution through both bodies of Congress.” He also noted the connection between the Boland Hall tragedy and the new law, stating that “if these common-sense fire safety disclosure requirements were in place years ago, many lives may have been saved. Fewer families may have endured the pain felt by the loved ones of the Seton Hall fire victims.”

The Campus Fire Safety Right-to-Know Act required institutions of higher education to annually report the number of fires and related property damage, injuries, and deaths, as well as fire safety systems, procedures, and policies in place. These reports were combined with the Clery Act’s campus safety reporting made to the U.S. Department of Education. They also had to be published or made available to both current and prospective students and staff as consumer disclosures.

There has been an overall decline in the number of campus-related fire deaths since 2000, but that’s likely because of an increase in the seriousness and preparation that institutions have brought to fire safety, catalyzed by the Seton Hall tragedy and the review of procedures and precautions that compliance with the act requires, rather than consumers’ direct use of the consumer disclosure reports. As we have written before, there’s little evidence that the Clery Act’s reports, which also cover fire safety, are a significant consideration for the vast majority of prospective students when deciding which institution to attend. Most aren’t even aware of their existence or availability.

And more importantly, the law does not cover off-campus residences where the majority of students live. This loophole means that, despite the law’s burdensome reporting and disclosure requirements, the 84 percent of fires and deaths related to students that occur off-campus do not fall under its purview. Instead, much more uneven state and local laws apply to these residences.

Ironically, the same reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, in which New Jersey’s legislators showed such support for transparency, reporting, and disclosure by institutions, also banned the Department of Education from collecting student unit information under the heading “Database of Student Information Prohibited.” Thanks to the limitations of the data that the Department of Education does collect, that means prospective students can’t know whether former graduates and non-completers earned enough to repay their student loans, what experiences and outcomes the growing population of part-time and transfer students had, or even accurate graduation rates.

While measuring the value of an education in different programs and institutions for individual students is no doubt drier than reporting on fire and campus safety, it is no less important given its relevance to each and every student. De-identified, unit-level data on student outcomes could be incorporated into reports that would be eminently more useful to prospective students and their families in choosing the right school—one that will give them the greatest chance of choosing a college that prepared them for a successful future (not to mention more useful to federal policy makers who currently can’t answer basic questions about their $150 billion annual investment in federal student aid).

In the same 2008 law in which the higher education lobby successfully campaigned against this type of federal data system, citing “reporting burden” as a primary argument, New Jersey legislators and their advocates managed to expand reporting and disclosure requirements for the acute but much less frequent problem of dorm fires. One hundred and twenty students have died in campus-related fires in the thirteen years since 2000; yet from just 2000 to 2011 over 2.5 million federal student loans went into default.

A shocking, bold-faced tragedy like the one that occurred at Boland Hall certainly galvanizes lawmakers and advocates to action. Yet complacency and failure to act when lives are not in immediate danger would be a mistake. A college education is often the single most important and expensive investment that a student or family makes. Instead of risking their physical lives, we are asking students to jeopardize their futures and our scarce tax dollars enrolling in questionable programs, simply because we don’t have the right information to hold them accountable –and the higher education lobby doesn’t want us to get it."