President Obama previously announced a plan that would rate colleges on their value. “What we want to do is rate them on who’s offering the best value so students and taxpayers get a bigger bang for their buck,” he said. There’s a little problem though, what determines “value?”

Nick Anderson writes at the Washington Post:

Obama administration retreats from federal college rating plan

The Obama administration has abandoned a plan for the federal government to rate colleges and universities, opting instead to give consumers more tools and information to draw their own conclusions.

The announcement Thursday shifted the course of an initiative that had drawn sharp criticism from the higher education community soon after President Obama announced it on Aug. 22, 2013.

In a speech that day at the University at Buffalo, Obama made his intentions clear: The federal government would rate colleges in a way that would offer consumers something very different from the rankings published by U.S. News & World Report and other analysts.

“First, we’re going to start rating colleges not just by which college is the most selective, not just by which college is the most expensive, not just by which college has the nicest facilities — you can get all of that on the existing rating systems,” Obama said. “What we want to do is rate them on who’s offering the best value so students and taxpayers get a bigger bang for their buck.”

His vision quickly ran into numerous questions: How to define the “best value”? What data should be used? Would the data be reliable? The biggest question was whether it was fair for the U.S. government to inject itself so directly into a market with thousands of institutions, public and private, and myriad specialized niches. Everyone acknowledged it would be unfair to compare an Ivy League institution with a state university that serves a broader population of students.