In the Washington Post, economic policy and finance/trade expert Charles Lane calculates the impact of President Obama’s “College Affordability Plan”.

President Obama deserves credit for using his bully pulpit to address the crisis in college affordability.

Especially admirable is his insistence that institutions must control their costs, instead of jacking up tuition and passing the expense on to students, as they have for decades.

It’s a message courageously directed at a portion of Obama’s own political base: the progressive types who run most campuses and who would much prefer some sort of state and federal bailout to painful budget-cutting.I wish the president’s higher-ed speech in Buffalo last week had specifically cited the bloated ranks of highly paid campus administrators, but he did forthrightly say that “not enough colleges have been working to figure out how do we control costs, how do we cut back on costs.”Unfortunately, Obama’s policy prescriptions — more aid and loans to students, coupled with pay-for-performance bonuses for schools — range from tepid to counterproductive.His headline idea was to have the Education Department rank institutions by “value” and, eventually, to link schools’ share of federal student aid to the rankings….

Effectiveness is the real shortcoming of the president’s idea. Consumers can never have too much information, so, by all means, create a federal scorecard that students and parents can consult along with the U.S. News and World Report ratings and whatever else.But “value” in education is notoriously difficult to define, much less quantify, so it’s likely that schools would figure out how to game Obama’s new system, assuming they don’t lobby it to death first.As for student aid, what the president can’t bring himself to admit is that federal tuition subsidies — whether Pell grants or cheap loans — have contributed to the problem.At Buffalo, the president boasted of lower student loan interest rates and said that, on his watch, many students’ repayments have been capped at 10 percent of monthly income; he proposed expanding eligibility for this benefit.

A White House fact sheet touted the $900 increase in the maximum Pell Grant under Obama, as well as the American Opportunity Tax credit, initially enacted as part of the 2009 stimulus bill and newly extended through 2017.These benefits do not make college “more affordable,” as Obama often says; they simply fuel the tuition price spiral. Aid renders families shopping for college less sensitive to price, thereby enabling institutions to raise tuition with impunity.