Heritage
Network
Morning
Bell: 4 Problems with Federal College
Scorecards
By Lindsey Burke
August 23, 2013
Yesterday,
President Obama announced his plan
to make “college more affordable, tackle rising costs, and improve
value for
students and their families.”
But
a big part of the President’s plan includes
creating a college rating system—a federal scorecard—to evaluate
colleges on
measures such as graduation rates, the number of low-income students
served
(i.e., the percentage of Pell Grant recipients), graduate earnings, and
affordability.
Scorecards
are a seductive idea. But having the
federal government issue scorecards to measure college output would be
a
mistake. Four problems with the President’s plan:
1.
Government says what’s best. As we wrote
yesterday in National Review Online, for one thing, a monopoly
government
scorecard would inevitably reflect what bureaucrats—rather than
parents,
students, and scholarly communities—determine is or is not important in
education.
2.
Special-interest institutions with more
clout could shape the standards. Existing institutions that are
comfortable
within the cocoon of protectionist accreditation would lobby hard, and
no doubt
effectively, for output measures that define success in their own terms.
3.
Standard-setters would also control college
funding. Educational institutions’ lobbying becomes particularly
problematic
when considering the second part of President Obama’s proposal: to then
tie
federal student aid to the new rating system by giving larger Pell
Grants and
lower student loan interest rates to students who enroll in colleges
that fare
well on the federal scorecard.
The
logical outcome is a system that has the
federal government handing out subsidies based on a rating system
designed by
the people handing out the funding. What could possibly go wrong?
4.
We already have scorecards. A competing
range of private outcomes-based scorecards already exists, sponsored by
such
outlets as U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, ACTA, and
Kiplinger’s. Each of
these reflects the differing visions of quality held by different
Americans,
from post-graduation salary to the likelihood of a well-rounded
education. A
one-size-fits-all federal rating system is unnecessary and will likely
trump
these independent evaluators that parents and students have long
trusted.
If
the Obama Administration truly wants to
“shake up” higher ed and bring down college costs, it would acknowledge
that
federal government intervention is the problem, not the solution.
Continuing
to increase federal subsidies
enables universities to raise tuition. Since 1982, the cost of
attending
college has increased 439 percent—more than four times the rate of
inflation.
Increases in college costs exceed increases in health care costs, which
have
risen more than 250 percent over the same time period. Economist
Richard Vedder
argues that “some of these financial aid programs have contributed
mightily to
the explosion in tuition and fees in modern times.”
The
key in education reform is to do things
that improve students’ learning. A federal college scorecard gets an F
on all
counts.
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this and other articles at The Heritage
Network
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