Jon Fansmith: All right. Well, hello and welcome to the June edition of dotEDU Live. I am your host, Jon Fansmith. I am joined by my wonderful co-host, Sarah Spreitzer, and also joined this week by special guest star, ACE Vice President and General Counsel Pete McDonough.
Pete, have you done this before? I feel like am I recalling correctly? Have we had you on before?
Pete McDonough: I have, but I don't think I've ever worn a blue shirt when you've been wearing a blue shirt.
Jon Fansmith: We should tell people we did not actually coordinate that, though I think it's working. I think it looks pretty good.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. Thanks for sharing the memo with me, guys.
Jon Fansmith: There is a lot going on in athletics that I don't know if anyone anywhere fully feels confident that they're on top of because it is a very shifting environment, right?
Pete McDonough: Absolutely is. Maybe it's best, Jon, that we start with what feels like the most recent, which is right before Memorial Day weekend, there was an announced settlement, I should say proposed settlement and emphasize the word proposed, it was announced by the NCAA and the Power 5 conferences. Those are the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, PAC 12, SEC.
They agreed to a settlement in three antitrust cases. One's called House v. NCAA, another one's called Hubbard v. NCAA, another is called Carter v. NCAA. We only hear the word House though. It's not the House of Representatives. It's actually the named plaintiff in the lead case. His name is Grant House and he was a swimmer at Arizona State.
There are other cases, I should note, that are still pending, including an antitrust case that's not part of this, but there's great hope in some corners that this proposed settlement here will help on a pathway toward, at some point, and it will be probably at some distant point, creating some level of certainty or presumptions about how the future of intercollegiate athletics will play out.
One of the key issues in this House case, and I'm going to call it that, involves restrictions on Name, Image and Likeness revenue sharing. For example, the plaintiffs in the case had said that future student-athletes should be given a portion of TV revenue, what you might think of as broadcast, Name, Image and Likeness rights. Okay, so there's a settlement. There's a lot of money involved in this settlement that is being proposed. It's got to be approved by the same Federal District Judge Claudia Wilken, who sits out in Oakland, California, who presided over the two large prior antitrust cases, O'Bannon, and more recently, Alston. She was appointed in the 1990s by President Clinton.
And there's a lot of detail that still needs to be worked out and put before Judge Wilken. Think of this as like there's term sheet for a deal, but now you have to actually go and create a contract. Well, we've got the term sheet right now. We don't yet have the contract.
And there's been a fair amount of reporting and presumptions about the deal from reading the term sheet, if you will, and I think it's fair to say that it includes at least these three key elements. The first is $2.8 billion. That money is going to be distributed backwards to student-athletes at all Division I schools that played any sport between 2016 and 2023, unless they choose to opt-out of this settlement and they'll be given an opportunity to do that by some sort of notice that will be sent to them.
The theory here is that these student-athletes could have received money for commercial use of their NIL, including broadcast rights, video games, et cetera, if the NCAA had permitted all of that at that time and they were damaged by the prohibitions that existed when they were playing and when they were student-athletes. We're probably talking about 15,000 or so student-athletes.
I don't think they'll see the money anytime soon, and there's plenty of unanswered questions about how that pie gets divided. It's likely the court's going to appoint a special master, that's typically the term used, that's probably going to be aided by a sports economist or three, and they're going to come up with some sort of formula to divide that pie among all these student-athletes.
Who's going to pay for that $2.8 billion, the backward-looking pile of money? Well, the NCAA is going to contribute, as has been reported, over $1 million toward that. The Power 5 conferences are going to contribute another $1.65 billion, I believe, and then the remaining 27 Division 1 conferences are going to pay nearly $1 billion, about $990 million.
How are they going to pay this money? Well, the NCAA is likely going to withhold payments to Division I schools over a period of years that they otherwise would've been distributed from what is primarily the March Madness pool of revenues. So the schools then are going to have to figure out, well, what are we going to do? How are we going to manage ourselves financially and otherwise without that revenue that we'd been counting on and budgeting into our projections for the future?
Okay, so that's the looking-back damages.
Going forward, and this, as I understand it, will apply only to the Power 5 conferences, 22 percent of the average Power 5 schools' revenues, which people are saying it works out to about $20 million or so per school, will be made available for distribution to their future student-athletes as part of a revenue sharing.
How's that going to be done? Don't know. And what revenue categories are going to be subject to this? Well, things like TV income, ticket sales at those sporting events, sponsorships, but apparently not donations to the Power 5 schools' athletics programs. Donor dollars are not supposedly going to be considered as part of revenues here. And there's going to be an automatic escalator each year to figure out what the 22 percent of the average of the Power 5 schools' revenues actually is.
Each school is supposedly going to be determining how much to offer their own student-athletes and determining their own methodology for figuring this out. It's going to be complex.
And the last thing that I'll say is that the settlement is supposed to remove all caps on the number of athletic scholarships which could be awarded by a school. As many of us know, if, for instance, baseball has a certain number of scholarships that could be offered in a particular year, women's lacrosse, those caps are going to be removed.
So that's essentially the settlement that's being discussed in the House case. I'm sure that your minds are swirling to a number of different issues, but I'll stop right there.
Sarah Spreitzer: So Pete, I am definitely not the expert here on college sports, but you talked a lot about Division I and that this case is going to impact the Division I athletes. What does it mean for Division II, for the rest of college sports, or the smaller schools that aren't Division I?
Pete McDonough: Yeah, so it's a great question, Sarah, and I think this is an appropriate point to pivot a little bit to what does the House settlement not involve? It does not involve the question of whether a student-athlete at Division I, II, or III is an employee, as an example.
Now, what do we mean by "is an employee"? Different views for different purposes. Some of us are aware that up in New England this past winter, the Dartmouth Men's Basketball Team attempted successfully so far to organize, to do collective bargaining, and the Regional Director of the National Labor Relations Board up there has ruled, at least for now, that they're entitled to organize because they have a lot of the attributes of employees vis-a-vis Dartmouth.
Well, the more, in my judgment, the outcome of the House settlement starts bringing student-athletes in the direction of feeling like, acting like being, compensated like employees as opposed to being first students and athletes second but not employees at all, there's a slippery slope involved.
And that brings me to another employment aspect of this storyline that the House case does not speak to, but it's been out there for a long time now. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia is probably pretty late to actually decide a case that's been before them for a pretty long time, and it's a case involving whether, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, primarily non-revenue sports athletes at a number of schools should be treated as employees entitled to overtime if they work past 40 hours, various other work rules that are applicable to employees that aren't, of course, now being applied to them.
Will there be an indirect impact on the thinking and positioning in those kinds of current and future arguments about whether a student-athlete is really an employee that flows from the outcome, if you will, the practical outcome of taking the House settlement and now applying it to the reality of the relationship between an institution and their student-athletes? It remains to be seen. I've even had folks suggest to me that maybe there's high schools that are extraordinarily competitive and have a lot of the same types of expectations and restrictions that Dartmouth imposes on their men's basketball team and maybe the high school athletes are actually employees of their high schools in some places.
So it is a new world and a lot more questions that need to be answered than there are answers right now.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I think it's such an uncertain environment, and as I think you've done a great job of highlighting for us, there's multiple different court cases, they have implications still to be determined. If you have all this mass confusion on a national scale about what may happen, wouldn't this be the ideal environment for, say, the federal governing body like the United States Congress to weigh in and maybe attempt to craft laws that provide some consistency and clarity?
And I guess the question I'm asking for you, and I'm being a little bit leading with the way I'm asking it is, is this Congress's role? Do you think they're going to step in? Do you think they're going to smooth everything out and provide some certainty for people as to what the environment for college athletics looks like?
Pete McDonough: Well, Jon, I'm going to answer your leading question with something very specific and current, and then if I may, step back just a little bit.
Specific and current: there's a bill that's been introduced into Congress that is being called "the Good Bill." Just like the House case isn't about the House of Representatives, we shouldn't presume that the Good Bill is being described as "the Good Bill" because everybody thinks it's good. I'm sure there are folks that don't.
Representative Good of Virginia along with a number of others have sponsored a bill that would essentially take a pen and write across any other legislation that relates to employment and say, "Yeah, but not intercollegiate student-athletes." The bill is, as written, is very straightforward. It says, "Not withstanding any other provision of federal or state law, a student-athlete or former student-athlete may not be considered an employee of an institution, a conference, or an association under any federal or state law based upon their participation as a student-athlete."
Wow. It's a big lift.
I should say that it has the backing, not surprisingly, of all levels of the NCAA. Sarah, you mentioned Division I, Division II, Division III. Well, all the chairs of those various levels of the NCAA Conference, they all support it, and there is a reason for that, which is it's hard to imagine us coming out on the other side of the current moment and preserving elements of what we have traditionally thought of as a student-athlete experience without there being positivity in all three branches of government as they look at various things.
So we were talking about the judicial branch just in terms of that settlement, but of course the judicial branch is going to be taking up challenges to things like the Good Bill if it becomes law. It's going to take up challenges to the outcomes in the FLSA employee's case. It's going to take up challenges about whether student-athletes can be unionized, et cetera, et cetera. And we haven't mentioned Title IX. Of course there will be Title IX implications here.
And now I get to the executive branch because as we all know, typically the real work, the real issues are in the enabling regulations and the outcomes to complaints filed with whether it be the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education or in the Department of Labor. So we're going to be awaiting how the Department of Labor treats some of these issues, how the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights treats some of these issues, and then how the courts, how they treat some of these issues.
So I think that it's complicated, and that's an understatement, and it's problematic for the people on our campuses who have to do things like look to the future, budget, explain to prospective students and student-athletes what the experience at their schools might be, try to ask themselves some hard questions about why do we have intercollegiate athletics in 2024? Is it because we've come to rely upon the revenue source or is it because we truly believe that there's a certain kind of an experience that we want to offer student-athletes? Is it alumni and donor-driven? What does it mean? We currently have 22 sports, should we have 18? We currently have 34, should we have 22? We currently have 15, should we have 21?
These are going to be hard questions. Do we cap our rosters? What does that mean? What does it mean for Title IX?
Sarah Spreitzer: So Pete, you mentioned the bill from Congressman Good, and just before this, you shared that the bill is going to be marked up soon and it's actually going to the Committee on Educational and the Workforce, and Chairwoman Foxx is a co-sponsor of the Good Bill, so obviously that will likely at least move in the House. It may not move in the Senate.
With all of these things swirling around, do you think traditional college athletic systems, the traditional experience of a student-athlete, is that gone starting next year? What does the near future look like?
Pete McDonough: Well, if we were to look at the numbers of student-athletes that participate at the Division III level and compare it to Divisions I and II, we'd see that most of the student-athletes actually compete at Division III level. And if we look at Division I, most of the student-athletes do not compete in football or men's basketball. So I think embedded in your question, Sarah, is what's trying to be preserved and why?
One of our daughters graduated in 2019 from a Division I school and played on a lacrosse team that was pretty constantly bumping into being in the top 20 in the country. They went to their conference finals all four years. She was, like many of her teammates, what I would say, the quintessential student-athlete. My goodness, there was a lot demanded of them as serious Division I athletes. A real lot. And I have sympathy for all student-athletes who are expected to do what she had to do. On the other hand, she had a real student experience, and now she has a real alumni cohort experience from that that I think she'll carry with her through life.
She only had about two or three students transfer in onto the team from other schools, and she had none transfer out from her team to another school, though because of COVID, one of her teammates ended up, just as an aside, getting one of those fifth-year COVID opportunities and went and played a graduate year at the University of North Carolina and was the MVP of the Women's Final Four. So that was a fun thing.
I'm mentioning this because I'm having a hard time imagining that the young woman, the young girl who is a sophomore in high school now and aspires to have the kind of experience my daughter did and can carry forward with it, that future embrace of what she did have, will be able to do that. What will it look like in 2027, '28, '29?
My bet is that schools are going to ask themselves this question. Are we just talking about men's basketball and football or are we talking about track and field lacrosse, field hockey? Are we talking about only the sports at schools that the media writes about or are we talking about the ones that the parents and kids talk to each other about? To be seen.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and I think that's probably a good place to wrap up this discussion on it, Pete.
I want to note we had a ton of questions coming into the session submitted in advance and during it, and I am not going to ask you those questions because I think one of the things that they all have in common is that we don't really know the answers to a lot of them. There are questions ranging from topics about the role of private equity in collegiate athletics, to how does DEI involve in these discussions about student-athletes and their treatment as employees, and what does it mean for international students?
And I think it's pretty telling to have that range of questions coming in because it indicates just the myriad ways that the changes we're seeing may impact the landscape of college athletics in ways that we are still parsing out. But thankfully, we have you to at least provide clarity where clarity is possible, and certainly happy... Are you going to stick around and talk with me and Sarah about some of the other things going on? You're certainly welcome to.
Pete McDonough: Sure, I'll be happy to. But Jon, even though you said we're ending here, I don't think we could talk about intercollegiate athletics without mentioning Caitlin Clark. So I have to, right?
It occurred to me that now that we've opened the door to institutions figuring out their methodology for allocating these revenues, won't we need to imagine that any school is going to have to assure that the next Caitlin Clark, or to preview the Paris Olympics, the next Sydney McLaughlin, superstar runner, is being fairly treated vis-a-vis male student-athletes at the school?
So what's that going to mean? Let's think about Caitlin Clark. Would she have gotten 10 times, 20 times, 100 times the amount of the starting right tackle on her school's football team? And is it going to change year to year? This is going to be really hard stuff, and athletics departments are going to be hiring very different kinds of people than they ever have in the past to try to help figure this stuff out as we go forward.
So I will end there and I'll now just listen and hang around as we keep talking about other stuff.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, well, I will say just because you raised Caitlin Clark, friends had tickets for the game here in D.C. on Saturday night that they invited me to, and I unfortunately had conflicting plans, so already regretting that decision to see her play live, but really great points, Pete, and thanks again.
We are going to transition over to some other issues. Sarah, there is still a lot of other things going on outside the athletic space on Capitol Hill. What are we most concerned about right now? Tell me what people should be focusing on.
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, even though I think most campuses have gone through their graduations and students are leaving campuses and we're hearing less and less about the protests on campuses, I think Congress is continuing to go full throttle, especially in the House with this looking at more oversight and holding more hearings regarding these protests on campus.
And so just this week, we have another hearing in the Ways and Means Committee, which obviously looks at tax policy and will be looking at our institutions' nonprofit status. They are looking at antisemitism on campus. They haven't announced the witnesses yet. But they also marked up a few bills a couple of weeks ago that were really about election interference but drifted towards foreign funding and antisemitism on campuses.
And so two that I would flag for our listeners are the H.R. 8293, the American Donor Privacy and Foreign Funding Transparency Act. This would require 501(c)3s to report foreign gifts. You wouldn't have to make the names public, but you would have to disclose how much foreign funding your 501(c)3 is receiving. And then the H.R. 8290, the Foreign Grant Reporting Act, which would require you to report if you're making any grants to foreign entities.
And so there's still a lot going on. There's also, there were several committees in the House that sent letters to 10 institutions of higher education reminding them that were all going to start doing oversight on their various issues, including the House Committee on Science, which is going to be looking at institutions that receive funding from the National Science Foundation, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has oversight on the National Institutes of Health, and then again, Ways and Means, and the Judiciary Committee. So way beyond Education & Workforce, which has really taken the lead on these issues.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I think it's an interesting point with the Ways and Means hearing that came out this week and then the letters, it's very clear that what has traditionally by jurisdiction fallen under the Education and the Workforce Committee in the House, it's really an expansion. It is 10 letters to 10 institutions, but it's six committees sending them and really announcing a broad-based approach.
Certainly, this is an issue that has resonated with the public. And while, as you pointed out I think so well, Sarah, as we were getting through the commencement season, and there have been fewer and fewer incidents that have risen to the national attention, things seem to be quieting down on campuses, certainly it's not quieting down in Congress, and I think there's a lot of interest in keeping attention and focus on this subject going forward through the rest of the year. And I think you just dropped that link in with the bills, and so thank you for doing that.
But the other thing, Sarah, which I actually expected you to lead off with, was the NDAA.
Sarah Spreitzer: I'm avoiding it.
Jon Fansmith: My favorite, your favorite, everyone's favorite. That's the National Defense Authorization Act, moving with great speed in the House. Let's talk about that for a little bit.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, and why is it our favorite, Jon? I mean, you wouldn't think, right? The National Defense Authorization Act, obviously we care about our veterans and our U.S. military and many of our institutions serve those populations, but over the past, I don't know, several years, it has become a vehicle for a lot of things that otherwise wouldn't move independently because it is a must-pass bill that authorizes the programs at the Department of Defense.
And so the House has marked up their bill in the House Armed Services. They're now going to be taking it to the floor, the House Floor, for a vote I believe next week, but they have to consider which amendments will be brought up on the floor. And so that's done by the House Committee on Rules. They are going to look and see which amendments will be made in order. They have over 1,300 amendments to actually examine. They just started the process this afternoon, and for our purposes, there's two amendments that we are watching very closely.
The first is the DETERRENT Act, which would amend Section 117, the foreign gift and contract reporting, at the Department of Education. It would lower the reporting threshold from $250,000 down to $50,000 or $0 for countries of concern. That would be China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia. It also greatly expands the reporting under Section 117. It would require institutions with over $50 million in federal research funding or that operate a Title VI center to report on individual gifts and contracts to faculty and staff in a public-facing database. There's provisions in there that would impact schools under the endowment tax and information that they would have to report publicly about funds that they have from foreign countries or investments that they have in foreign countries. There's also a provision that would require the Secretary of Education to examine any contract that you have with a foreign entity and either sign off on it, grant you a waiver, or restrict the contract at your institution of higher education. So a really expansive bill that passed the House at the end of December. It's not getting any traction really in the Senate and so they're going to try and move it by attaching it to the NDAA.
The other amendment we are watching very closely, Jon, that I know that you've worked on is the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, which again, you might say, "Well, how is that germane to the National Defense Authorization Act?" But this is the bill that would expand eligibility for the Pell Grant and allow for short-term Pell Grants. But obviously, we opposed it when it was being considered in the committee.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And it's worth noting because I think this is an interesting, and we've talked about it before on this podcast, but we actually at ACE, and I know some of our colleague associations do as well, support the underlying provisions within the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act. We are supportive of extending Pell eligibility to short-term programs. The problem is that, as it has been since the committee introduced this bill, there is an offset, a funding mechanism included that would pay for the bill that targets a group of institutions and exposes them to a risk-sharing scheme to generate revenue to the offset. And we just, I think this is broadly supported across higher education, are very concerned about implementing federal policy that targets a handful of institutions and makes them responsible for paying for a benefit that accrues to all institutions, especially treating a handful of institutions differently than every other institution under the federal aid system.
So it's a problematic approach. I think there's a real level of frustration we have with this, and we've expressed this before. This is good policy. It's bipartisan. It is the sort of thing that would be great to see in a Congress that frankly has not passed a lot of significant legislation, certainly not in the higher education space. There's a real opportunity to do something good here. It just has this poison pill piece that we would like to see removed, and I think were that to be the case and a more reasonable offset identified, this is the kind of thing that not just the House, but the Senate could pass, and I think President Biden, his administration would be supportive as well.
So we will see. Certainly attaching it to the NDAA with the same offset as it was supposed to go to the House Floor with, not a positive sign in terms of the openness to making changes, but Rules will rule today and we'll find out whether it's in order.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, and if it is made in order, then obviously we will be sending more letters up asking that members oppose those amendments on the floor.
I would also say, Jon, there's a handful of amendments impacting research security, also antisemitism. Again, whether or not institutions are doing enough on antisemitism and tied to Department of Defense funding, we're going to wait to see whether or not those are made in order, and then obviously we'll be communicating with the House as that bill moves forward.
But while I've been watching the NDAA, Jon, I think you've been busy with appropriations because that process also has some forward momentum.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. Well, and to be candid, I think our colleague, Emmanual, has been closely watching appropriations and then telling me what he's been following.
But it's been interesting. The Senate is not really moving forward with proposed bills, whereas the House is, under a new chairman, following a pretty rigorous schedule. They marked up the MilCon VA bill last week. They are expected to mark up the Labor, HHS, Education bill, which covers financial aid, NIH funding, a bunch of other things that we care about, at the end of the month. We don't know what the levels will be, but what we do know in the aggregate and the macro level about where the House funding bills are coming in is it's not good news.
In total, the bills together would propose about a $9 billion increase for Defense and Homeland Security, and about a $67 billion decrease for non-defense spending. That's a significant cut. It would be at some of the levels that were agreed to previously, but that money last year at least was offset by what's being called a handshake agreement for about $69 billion in additional spending that then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached with President Biden. The Current Speaker of the House, Mike Jonson, and the current Chair of the Appropriations Committee, Tom Cole, neither of them... They've both been very clear they were not party to that deal, so they don't choose to honor it for this year. So that money is off the table. That creates a lot of downward pressure on the non-defense spending bills.
Labor, HHS, Education is the biggest of the non-defense spending bills and is likely to see cuts maybe up into the double-digits in percentages. It is a significant possible cut, and we saw last year, House Republicans with more money to spend proposed things like eliminating the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program, the Federal Work-Study program, cuts in other areas. Certainly, we have concerns given the up-and-down nature of what we've been hearing about Pell Grant funding about what we might see in terms of Pell Grants. I think certainly a lot of concern about seeing an increase, which we think is necessary, maybe even with other problems about a possible shortfall, what may be necessary, which if there is a shortfall to address, and it seems unlikely for this year, but if there is a shortfall, that creates even further pressure to find funding across the bill.
So a difficult year ahead. That said, in recent years, the House has generally been the lower of the levels. The Senate usually comes in much higher, so we'll see when the Senate moves.
I think the other thing to keep in mind is we are in a presidential election year, so there's probably not going to be, no matter how fast the House moves, a lot of action on finishing up appropriations until we've seen the results of the election. And generally, what Congress does in these circumstances is especially if there's a new administration, punt some of the decisions around appropriations into the new year so that there's time to review the new administration's priorities, or even the existing administration's changes in priorities. A lot of leverage about what the makeup of the House and the Senate will look like leading to deferring some of the funding decisions.
So we are probably not at an immediate point to see this. Early signs, not positive, but a long way to go in the process. And as always, if you are not having those conversations with your members of Congress about the needs across your campuses, the needs your students have, please do so. It really does matter and it really does resonate with them and every bit of communicating that helps as we make the argument here in D.C. to continue and enhance support for these programs.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, thanks for that, Jon. I mean, for that super cheery update on the approps process. Can't wait until next month.
Jon Fansmith: I said, "Look, it doesn't look great now, but there's a long way to go." You know?
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, how about are they putting-
Jon Fansmith: That constitutes cheery these days, I think.
Sarah Spreitzer: Are they considering any money to actually fix the FAFSA or to help the Department of Education meet their October 1st deadline for the new FAFSA?
Jon Fansmith: I mean, that's actually a great question. There was supposed to have been an agreement in the last appropriation cycle to provide additional funding for FSA, the Federal Student Aid Office at the Department of Education. That ultimately resulted in a zero-flat funding for that office. I don't think, given what has happened, there's a whole lot of congressional sympathy for that office in terms of how the FAFSA implementation has gone.
That said, it's also pretty clear that this has not gone well and they could probably benefit from some additional resources as we look ahead. Again, appropriations will probably occur too late to get money to the department, an increase. That might impact the coming academic year cycle. But certainly I think everybody can say there is a need as the FSA Office, as Secretary Cardona has announced, will be restructuring. They'll be looking for a new head. They'll have an interim chief operating officer in place.
So there's a lot happening at FSA that, again, still to be determined, but certainly will have some funding implications.
Sarah Spreitzer: So, we did have a question from the audience. I don't know if you want to take this bet or set the odds, but what are the odds that the department is going to roll out the FAFSA on October 1st?
Jon Fansmith: So not to-
Sarah Spreitzer: And remember, this is live and being recorded.
Jon Fansmith: Right, right, and being recorded. And not to do a lawyerly parsing of what does the word "the" mean or something like that, but when you say, "What are the odds they will roll out a FAFSA on October 1st," I'd say if that is your bet using that question, I'd say the odds are really good, three to two that they will do it. Probably even better than that, two to three.
They will have something out. I don't think anyone believes they will not have something out on October 1st. And the reason I'm talking about October 1st is that has recently been the date on which the FAFSA is made live. It is not required by law that October 1st is the date, but over the last few years, that has been the tradition. We moved it up in the process, particularly to help low-income students find out about their aid awareness earlier in the process, give them more time to weigh offers and consider the options they have.
The issue with that is not whether the department will have something up on October 1st. I think the question is, will it be everything from day one ready to go? And when the secretary has been asked about this in various settings, his answers have stopped somewhat short of giving you confidence. He will reassert that is their goal, that is their expectation, they will do everything they can. He hasn't pledged that they'll be able to meet that, and I think given the fact that we're already behind on some key steps around the FAFSA for next year, the form hasn't been circulated for review, which is a traditional step that would've taken place by this point by the department, it's reasonable to wonder about how much of the overall FAFSA processing the application form, especially the back-end processing on the department's part, will be available by October 1st.
So will there be something up? Yes, I feel very confident something will be up by October 1st. Will all of the full functionality be in place by October 1st? Well, that, I think, is more of a let's-wait-and-see situation.
Sarah Spreitzer: Okay. Last question and then a follow-up to that. Are there going to be any dramatic changes with whatever they roll out in the fall compared to what they had this year?
Jon Fansmith: I mean, I can't envision it because in part, the changes are dictated by statute, right? I mean, the reason they made the changes in the first place is Congress dictated what the form would look like, that Congress dictated the changes to the eligibility formulas. This is all congressionally mandated and we don't have other legislation.
Will they have other functionalities available? I can't say that I'm aware of any that are underway, but I know that they are looking at ways to get more access to the FAFSA form, always looking for ways to simplify it, make it easier for students to apply. If there are methods of doing that that they're considering, that would be great. I'm just not aware of it.
Sarah Spreitzer: Okay. Well, can't wait for the fall.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah.
Sarah Spreitzer: Exciting. Appropriations-
Jon Fansmith: Elections and FAFSA and all sorts of things going on.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, yeah. Lots of stuff.
Jon Fansmith: Anything else you wanted to touch on, or Pete too? We have a few minutes left and we've run through what we had on our agenda.
Pete McDonough: Well, since we mentioned the fall and the election, I guess I'll just give a little preview note.
As many that are listening in today know, ACE periodically updates, refreshes essentially, an issue brief that we put out relating to voting, and particularly institutional obligations in enabling voting and registration, and also political activity, the dos and don'ts on campus, particularly for schools that are private nonprofits.
We are refreshing that, and I expect that before the end of this month, we'll have the refreshed 2024 version of that ready and out. Of course, this is going to be a year that may be like no other because of not only a highly anticipated presidential election that will be between a sitting president and a former president, but we have the challenges of the anniversary of the October 7 massacre that will certainly be with us, and so we'll have a semester that's going to wrap around at least most of those things.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I think we can safely say, Pete, from conversations we've had with college presidents, there is a lot of thought about what the fall will look like, concern about different ways these big events may impact their campuses, and so I know the guide is always very, very helpful. It's one of those things. I think it's probably always on our top downloaded list of things from ACE, so timely, especially timely this year, and certainly express appreciation for you and the work you do in putting that together and making that available to members.
And thanks, everyone, for watching as always, thanks so much for the great questions, and thanks so much for your support. We appreciate it and we will see you next month.
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