Dive Brief:

• The U.S. Department of Education is continuing to study how best to offer federal aid eligibility to alternative credentialing programs like coding bootcamps and MOOCs.
• The department has requested input about how to judge quality, and in a recent blog post, Undersecretary of Education Ted Mitchell mentioned the idea of creating new quality assurance questions for alternative programs that measure student learning and outcomes.
• Experts will gather at the White House in July as the Department of Education continues to plan an experimental sites program to offer temporary federal aid to otherwise ineligible education providers that partner with accredited institutions.

Dive Insight:

As nontraditional programs continue to fill out the post-secondary space, traditional structures and processes must be revised to accommodate them. Inside Higher Ed reports that those working on the experimental sites project would like to announce a plan within the next two months. Across the industry, there has been a recognition that these alternative pathways could provide the next big frontier for profits. For-profit education providers Kaplan Inc. and the Apollo Group have already invested in coding bootcamps, projecting continued growth — and perhaps even a boom — if federal aid is opened up to them. Some inside the traditional space, however, do not want to see alternative providers go the way of for-profit colleges, many of which rely almost exclusively on federal aid for their revenue.