 EDUCAUSE policy partners with a variety of higher education associations to influence education and technology policy. To better understand the policy challenges confronting college and university presidents and other senior leaders, we asked association representatives to describe the most important policy challenges facing higher education today. Well, right now I would say that our focus is pretty much on three A's, access, attainment and accreditation. These are three items that we have been focusing on with our policy initiatives and our advocacy here in Washington. We are also very focused on the need for higher education to do the best it can to meet the Obama Administration's 2020 goal of having the most college graduates of any nation. Now on both the federal and state and local levels, accountability in all its forms has been a growing issue for community colleges. Trying to find the right way to show what colleges are doing in a way that aligns with the mission of the colleges. So at the federal level, we're judged primarily by our graduation rate numbers, which are flawed in a number of respects. I think the largest issue we face is the rising cost of higher education. There are pressures coming from all angles on institutions to keep costs under control. And there's a lot of scrutiny of how families and how governments are paying for a higher education. The student aid programs, the student loans that families take out, the rising costs. So there's a lot of interest in how institutions are managing costs and people turn to the business office for answers. Well, the major issue for our association members right now is the continual state disinvestment in higher education. States have traditionally played a very strong role in making higher education affordable by providing state subsidies to institutions. But in the last two decades, there have been a continual erosion of the state investment in higher education, leading to higher tuition prices for students and their families. I'd say probably our biggest challenge for our members now is the steady decline of state funding for public universities, which really threatens their capacity in the future to maintain the quality of research as well as education that they have in the past. But because research is such an important part of our institutions, the current federal budget crisis really presents a challenge for all of our universities. The uncertain future of federal domestic spending really is a threat to our ability to sustain research programs. So that's something we're very concerned about. The public policy issues that research libraries face are integrally tied to the evolving roles of research and education. And so issues that touch on the ability of our students, our faculty, our researchers to really effectively use information in support of these new models is where we are focused. So copyright issues have always been a priority for ARL. So when libraries find an exciting new way to take advantage of their collections that involves computers, it's going to implicate copyright. And so what we've been doing is looking for ways to tailor those programs and to think of legal strategies so that we can do what we need to do and what our users on campus need for us to do for them while staying within the bounds of the wall. I think one of the biggest issues that will be impacted after the next election is the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The current legislation expires in FY 2014 and the makeup of the Congress and the person sitting in the White House at the time are going to have a huge influence on any changes that are made to that legislation. EDUCAUSE policy stands ready to represent our members' interests in Washington, D.C. We recognize that information technology policy issues are only a small part of the overall policy concerns of campus presidents and government relations officers. However, information technology is pervasive and inevitably intersects with virtually every challenge and opportunity that currently confronts higher education.