DES MOINES, IOWA (March 19, 2025) — Iowa House Republicans passed a number of bills through the full House to reform Iowa’s higher education system, refocusing it on providing quality education to students and preparing the state’s workforce.
Representative Taylor Collins (R-Mediapolis) was tasked with leading the House’s Higher Education Committee, a new committee formed this session to take a comprehensive look at Iowa’s higher-education system.
“Our higher-education system is facing critical issues from out-of-control costs to a lack of intellectual diversity on campus,” Rep Collins said. “We’ve done great work over the past two years in ridding identity politics from our state’s public universities and instead embracing intellectual diversity, but a holistic look at the crises facing our higher education system and the state’s workforce needs was long overdue.”
The Higher Education Committee got straight to work on that review, passing out a total of sixteen bills to control costs, increase transparency, reform core curriculum, increase civics proficiency, and ensure academic programs align with the state’s workforce needs.
Today, Iowa House Republicans passed the following bills through the full Iowa House, sending the bills to the Senate for consideration.
House File 269 — Freedom from Indoctrination Act: Ensures that no student is forced to take courses promoting ideological activism, such as critical-race theory or diversity, equity, and inclusion as a condition of obtaining a degree while protecting the academic freedom of faculty from mandatory infusions of DEI-related course content.
House File 401 — Core Curriculum Act: Establishes undergraduate general education requirements across Iowa’s regent universities, requiring specific credit hours in English, Mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, Western heritage, and American heritage. Also, the bill mandates that core curriculum courses do not distort historical events or promote identity politics.
House File 295 — Accreditation Autonomy Act: Allows the universities or the attorney general to sue an accreditor if an accreditor forces a university to violate state law to maintain their accreditation status.
House File 437 — Center for Intellectual Freedom Act: Establishes a Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa to conduct teaching and research in the historical ideas, traditions, and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order and society.
The center will coordinate with the Center for Cyclone Civics at Iowa State, and the Center for Civic Education at the University of Northern Iowa to enable shared course offerings. The center will first offer a course in American History and Civil Government that will be available to all three regent universities, building on the strong social studies standards that House Republicans established at the K-12 level last year. The center is also charged with increasing the intellectual diversity of the university’s academic community and fostering civic engagement among university students and faculty.
House File 440 — College Affordability Act: Contains several provisions to control the cost of college for students.
- Requires tuition rates for each academic year to be set on or before April 30th of each year before the beginning of each academic year, ensuring that, as students enroll for college each spring, they know the tuition price they will be paying that fall.
- Directs each regent university to offer at least one Work-Study program where a student earns their degree while working part-time and getting their tuition paid by the employer.
- Directs each regent university to offer at least one three-year Bachelor's Degree.
- Directs the Board of Regents to conduct a feasibility study on establishing a tuition guarantee, where a freshman who begins college cannot be charged a higher-tuition rate than they started with in their freshman year.
House File 856 - Replacing DEI with MEI (Merit, Excellence and Intelligence): Roots out DEI from community colleges and private institutions accepting tax-payer funding through the Iowa Tuition Grant.
In addition to these legislative proposals passing through the Iowa House, the House Higher Education Committee has secured additional policy wins through negotiations with the Board of Regents.
The Board of Regents has agreed to conduct a full review of all academic programs at each regent university to determine their alignment with the state’s workforce needs and will adopt an official board policy ensuring annual tuition increases for resident undergraduate students do not exceed a three-year rolling average of the higher-education price index. They have also agreed to adopt additional transparency measures — including for course syllabuses and university finances that passed through the Higher Education committee as board policy.
“We appreciate the Board of Regents’ continued cooperation and response to these important policies advanced by the Higher Education Committee,” said Rep Collins.
