Despite Complaints, Obama Rolls Out His College Ratings Plan
I hope academics enjoy the imperial presidency they so enthusiastically supported!
Despite numerous complaints about a proposed college ratings plan, Obama is going forward with enacting his plans.
The Obama administration will spell out an ambitious college-rating plan on Friday that introduces new metrics to judge the nation’s roughly 5,000 colleges and universities at a time when student debt is hamstringing the U.S. economy and the efficiency of the higher-education sector is in question.
Under the draft framework, schools may be judged on graduation and retention rates; the ability of their graduates to pay back their student loans; and the schools’ accessibility to low-income and first-generation students.
The Department of Education will seek comments to weigh the pros and cons of each metric before finalizing the system before the start of the next academic year.
“The public should know how students fare at institutions receiving federal student aid, and this performance should be considered when we assess our investments and set priorities,” said Department of Education Under Secretary Ted Mitchell. “We also need to create incentives for schools to accelerate progress toward the most important goals, like graduating low-income students and holding down costs.”
For years, the U.S. government has provided billions in grants and loans to the higher-education system, while leaving questions of its quality to others. Publications like U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings focus largely on things like the test scores and grade-point averages of incoming students, as well as faculty quality, without assessing how much students learn and how they thrive financially after they leave.
President Barack Obama’s plan, announced in August 2013 and twice delayed, seeks to change that and aims to eventually tie federal funds to the ratings. But few in academia believe there is an equitable way to rate so many schools; they say whatever variables are selected will necessarily skew the ratings in that direction.
“You just cannot compare [the broad variety of schools] coherently,” said Bates College President Clayton Spencer. “You need to compare them in a mission-specific way.”
Comments
The president has no authority to do any of this, but then when has that ever stopped him. Want the end to any quality to higher ed, then allow the gov to dictate things. The next step will be the public creating a better alternative.
“We also need to create incentives for schools to accelerate progress toward the most important goals, like graduating low-income students and holding down costs.”
Under Secretary Mitchell, I have a question: WHY? Why does the Government CARE if low income students are graduated and/or if costs are held down? If those things do not occur, economics will finally take hold again and a.) perhaps lenders will finally start doing true UNDERWRITING of loans to prospective college students and tell some of them “you’re just not cut out for college;” and b.) some students will self-select themselves out of going to college due the debt load, which will reduce demand and therefore reduce the cost as colleges attempt to keep up the student supply.
Further, with fewer college students acquiring degrees, the value of a degree will then go back up, as you won’t have college graduates fighting for minimum-wage positions at McDonalds because the market is so saturated.
We have turned a college degree from something special as an educational mark into a basic commodity.