Transcript withholding by colleges and universities to be regulated

 Inside Higher Ed has the story:

U.S. Bans Most Withholding of Transcripts. The Education Department strengthens its oversight of institutions with a sweeping set of rules finalized this week.  By  Katherine Knott

"Afederal policy change could give thousands of students access to transcripts and academic credits their colleges have withheld because they owed the institutions money. The new rule, part of a broad package of regulations the U.S. Education Department unveiled Tuesday, could amount to a national ban on the practice of transcript withholding, experts say.

Institutions sometimes withhold transcripts to force a student to pay a balance on their account. Without their transcripts, students often can’t continue their education elsewhere without starting over, and they cannot apply for certain jobs. The practice has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, with dozens of states enacting their own bans.

The department’s new rule is broader than what the agency proposed in May and would prevent a college or university from withholding a student’s transcript for terms in which a student received federal financial aid and paid off the balance for the term. Research from Ithaka S+R, a research and consulting group, has shown that about six million students have what are called stranded credits because of transcript withholding.

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“For a large number of students and former students who are impacted by transcript withholding, this should solve a significant portion of the problem,” said Edward Conroy, a policy fellow at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “Because in most cases, even when former students owe larger debts, nobody owes a debt for the entirety of their degree. It might be for their last semester or something like that.”