[caption id=”attachment_105991″ align=”aligncenter” width=”4256″] U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, right (AP Photo/The Tennessean, John Partipilo)
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The U.S. Department of Education will release the first outline of its new college ratings system on Friday and it is already causing a lot of division between the administration, Republicans and higher education advocates.
Friday’s draft is expected to include the metrics on which colleges would be rated by the federal government, Inside Higher Education reported. These metrics would be used to rate more than 6,000 colleges nationwide based on their calculated value to students and to society. Some of these criteria likely include graduation rates, the cost of tuition and the percentage of low-income students, according to previous reports.
President Obama first announced his intention to get the federal government involved in the ratings game in August 2013, but Education Department officials have twice delayed the release of its draft proposal. It was originally expected last spring.
The federal government spends about $150 billion a year on student financial aid for about 13 million students, Politico reported. The idea is to give the government more control over where federal dollars are spent. Colleges that rank higher will get more money and money will be pulled from lower ranking institutions.
Though the criteria has not yet been released, some Republicans are already upset about the federal government getting into this kind of regulation, according to Politico.
“They’re getting involved in something they have no business getting involved with,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.). “Absolutely, it’s overreach.”
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) told Politico that he plans to lead an effort to cut off funding for the ratings initiative and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said he would lead the charge in the Senate.
Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, told the news site that “the devil will be in the details” of the rating plan and he would reserve judgment until seeing the proposal. But, he added, “the administration’s continued go-it-alone approach is out of touch and not in the best interests of students.”
Many of the Republicans opposed the rating system, but agreed that the administration should make sure that there is more information out there for students looking into college.
The administration does already post scorecards for many colleges, but it is not widely used. Proponents of the new ranking system argue that giving the college one ranking or grade would make people pay more attention.
That’s also what has critics worried. While the administration said it doesn’t want to penalize colleges for accepting the most challenging students or turning out lower-paid graduates like teachers, a letter grade won’t reflect that.
“It’s an effort to boil all of what a university does down to a single score,” Patricia McGuire, the president of Trinity Washington University, told Politico. “And there’s a lot at stake if the federal government says you’re an ‘A’ institution or a ‘D’ institution.”
