Let me start off by saying that for the most part, I agree with much of President Obama’s domestic policy since taking office. My bias out of the way, I want to take a moment and reflect on the President’s recent visit to New York State, during which he visited two of the State University of New York’s premier, research oriented universities, and Henninger High School, here in Syracuse. During his visit to UB (alas, one of my numerous alma maters), the President outlined his plan to make college more affordable for the middle class. While this is certainly a noble undertaking, part of the President’s “plan” includes a mandate to the U.S. Department of Education to develop a “a new ratings system to help students compare the value offered by colleges and encourage colleges to improve.” The rating system, to be implemented by 2015, would assess factors including access to low income students, based on Pell Grants awarded, affordability, based on average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt, and outcome, based on graduation and transfer rates, ‘graduate earnings,’ and advanced degrees of college graduates.
Now, keeping higher education affordable should be a top priority of this country. After all, without accessible, affordable higher education, where would we really be? The post-World War 2 GI Bill was a major force driving the economic success enjoyed by the middle class during the last half of the 20th century. Likewise, university investment in so called “high tech” fueled the brief period of middle class prosperity at the end of the 20th century and continues to impact our economic stability today.
My issue with the President’s so called “plan” for the Education Department to rate (or rank, if you prefer) U.S. colleges and universities to compete with private rankings such as U.S. News and The Princeton Review is that to effectively rank colleges based on the above standards would require the Department of Education to conduct a long-term longitudinal study to determine which colleges and universities are, in fact, the “best” as deemed by the President’s standards. It would be impossible to determine the “outcome factor” of graduate earnings without conducting such a study. In short, how is the Department of Education going to be able to determine the “value” of a college’s or a university’s degree without tracking graduates over a long period of time? Case in point: A Syracuse College of Law graduate may decide to take a public interest law job, which pays $40,000 per year, while a graduate of Onondaga Community College graduate may get a job at a family company that pays $100,000 per year. Twenty years from now, the same SU law graduate may be the senior counsel at Apple, making millions of dollars per year, while the OCC graduate, through promotion, may be making $200,000 pe year. While this is a very simplistic example, under the President’s mandate to look at “outcomes,” OCC outranks SU as a university.
Keeping higher education affordable to the middle class is a noble undertaking, and I applaud the president for even considering it; however, there are so many possible strategies to achieving this goal, the notion of a Federal Government ranking of colleges and universities is a poorly veiled attempt at making national education policy.