H.R. 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008, was passed in the House of Representatives in February and passed the Senate last week. It has been presented to the President, who is expected to sign it any minute now.

According to the number-crunching we’ve done using government estimates, implementing the bill will cost the average U.S. family a little over $1,200.

It’s hard to call a big bill like this simply “good” or “bad.” A lot of different folks have something to say about specific pieces of it, though.

Here’s Carnegie Learning, Inc., for example, telling us what’s good in the bill:

Among its many provisions, [the bill] requires that education textbook publishers provide unbundled alternatives to textbooks sold shrink-wrapped or “kitted” with additional materials such as software, pass-codes, or workbooks. The bill has the potential to drive down the cost of academic materials by requiring publishers to disclose the availability of these alternatives, and to price and sell components separately so that costs per item are transparent to instructors and students.

Carnegie sees some money to be made. Good for them. Maybe good for students. Maybe not so good for textbook publishers.

On the other hand, tech news outlet Ars Technica reports on something negative, or at least controversial, in the bill:

The Senate and House . . . approved controversial new provisions that will require universities to provide students with access to commercial music downloading services and implement traffic filtering technologies in order to deter peer-to-peer filesharing. . . . These provisions have strong support from the content industry, but have been targeted with widespread criticism from the academic community and advocacy groups such as Educause.

These are just a couple of provisions in this 431-page bill.

So, whaddya say? Good or bad? Would you have voted Yes or No? (The votes in the House and Senate will go up just as soon as the President signs the bill into law.)

Here’s the current vote on the bill. It stays open through the rest of this Congress, even though the bill has passed. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article for the bill.