President Obama’s New College-Ranking System

President Obama is starting a two-day bus tour of college campuses today to talk about his proposal for making colleges more affordable. The gist of the proposal is a new college rankings system based on metrics like graduation rates and earnings of graduates and tying financial aid to the best performing colleges:

A draft of the proposal, obtained by The New York Times and likely to cause some consternation among colleges, shows a plan to rate colleges before the 2015 school year based on measures like tuition, graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and the percentage of lower-income students who attend. The ratings would compare colleges against their peer institutions. If the plan can win Congressional approval, the idea is to base federal financial aid to students attending the colleges partly on those rankings.

Inside Higher Ed has more about the proposal here. Tyler Cowen doesn’t get it. Matthew Yglesias calls it “both modest and radical” and revolutionary in theory if the rankings actually do a good job of measuring college performance (which, as things go, is probably too good to be true, but I’m feeling cynical today). We have many readers who work in education who could probably chime in with more perspective, but at this point, I’m siding with Cowen.

Photo: BeckyF

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