It wasn’t a very good plan anyway. Now it’s not going to happen.

The LA Times reported.

College ratings system proposed by Obama is scrapped

Nearly two years ago, President Obama proposed a federal system to rate the nation’s colleges and universities, one that would provide families with an objective and unified tool to compare schools and for taxpayers to determine whether the massive investments in scholarships and other government spending on higher education are worthwhile.

The idea, however, was met with protests and concerns from college leaders who contended that it was misconceived and could unfairly pit schools against each other.

After repeated delays and many consultations with skeptical college leaders, the ratings system was recently scrapped.

White House officials say that pushback from the higher education industry and congressional Republicans did not lead to the retreat. Instead, they say they could not develop a ratings system that worked well enough to help high school seniors, parents and counselors.

Ted Mitchell, U.S. undersecretary of education, said attempts to bundle many measurements of colleges’ performance into a single score backfired, making the effort “less transparent.”

The department, he said, wanted to avoid “a black box that would be hard for consumers to penetrate and understand and that actually would not be an advance on the state of the art.”

Plus, the supposed simplicity of a single score “would belie a lot of complexity students and families need to understand. And it would mask some very big differences among institutions,” said Mitchell, past president of Occidental College and of the state Board of Education.