Obama Administration’s College Rating Proposal Threatens Core Educational Values
As May turns to June and summer weather arrives, this blog will take a week-long break. Back on Tuesday, June 3.
Over the weekend, the NY Times reported on Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s planned rating system for American colleges and universities. At a time when we have seen an explosion of marginal, for-profit, often on-line institutions of higher education siphoning federal loans and grants that may never be repaid, I can understand that the federal government would seek to protect its investment, but surely our recent experiment with school accountability that ranks K-12 schools based on their students’ test scores should cause us to proceed cautiously. There has been considerable collateral damage.
Caution is not part of the Administration’s plan, however. Officials claim the Administration’s rating system will be in place by the end of the year: “Mr. Obama and his aides say colleges and universities that receive a total of $150 billion each year in federal loans and grants must prove they are worth it. The problem is acute, they insist: At too many schools, tuition is going up, graduation rates are going down, and students are leaving with enormous debt and little hope of high-paying jobs.” The NY Times reports that, “Mr. Obama’s system would not rank schools numerically but would give them grades or ratings like ‘excellent,’ ‘good’ ‘fair’ or ‘poor.’”
Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, has pretty much announced this is a done deal: “For those who are making the argument that we shouldn’t do this, I think those folks could fairly have the impression that we’re not listening. There is an element to this conversation which is, ‘We hope to God you don’t do this.’ Our answer to that is: ‘This is happening.’ ” And Arne Duncan, in his usual disdain for the status quo, commented: “We have a financial and moral obligation to be good stewards of these dollars. To defend thestatus quo, for me, you can’t do that.”
According to the recent NY Times report and earlier coverage of plans to rate colleges, the factors will be graduation rates, price of tuition and fees, debt load students carry after they graduate, and even how much money students make after graduation, although this last data will be difficult to collect. Valuing salaries as a measure of educational quality is also Obama Administration’s College Rating Proposal Threatens Core Educational Values | janresseger: