Colleges welcomed the news Thursday that the Obama administration would ditch the president’s plans to rate and rank schools based on affordability and effectiveness.
The Department of Education announced on Thursday that it was moving ahead with plans for an online tool for prospective students to compare colleges, but that it wouldn’t include a single affordability rating or rank colleges against one another.
By leaving out the ratings, the Department of Education abandoned a 2013 promise by President Obama.
“What we want to do is rate [schools] on who’s offering the best value so students and taxpayers get a bigger bang for their buck,” Obama said in a speech on college affordability in August 2013, saying that he meant to “jumpstart competition” between colleges.
Higher education groups on Thursday applauded that such a direct comparison would not be part of the site.
“The department is to be commended for listening carefully to the higher education community and its concerns about the ways that the previously proposed ratings system might mislead students and their families,” Association of American Colleges and Universities President Carol Geary Schneider said in a statement Thursday evening. “The U.S. Department of Education has made a wise decision to abandon efforts to ‘rate’ individual colleges and universities against one another based on limited data sets.”
Arguing that a ratings system could create misaligned incentives or mislead students, American Council on Education President Molly Corbett said that “it appears the administration is going in the right direction — away from a simplistic, one-size-fits-all approach that would do more harm than good and toward a consumer-oriented system that recognizes the diversity of American higher education.”
Increasing accountability is one of several tools the Obama administration has tried to use to increase college attendance and graduation. The president also has sought to make the terms of federal student loans more favorable to borrowers, among other initiatives.
For for-profit colleges, which have higher rates of student loan default among their graduates, the Obama administration has set a gainful employment rule, set to go into effect July 1. The rule sets eligibility standards for federal student aid for for-profit schools.
But nonprofit schools will not face a ratings system tied to aid.
The decision Thursday was also welcomed by House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline of Minnesota, who said that the “arbitrary” rating would have “ultimately discouraged innovation, reduced access for disadvantaged individuals, and used limited taxpayer dollars to reward institutions that put the department’s priorities before students.”
Some student advocates had expressed reservations about the incentives created by a ratings system. For instance, the important number to students is the net price they will pay to attend college, but state governments would be more interested in the amount of subsidies going to schools.
Carrie Warick, director of partnerships and policy for the nonprofit National College Access Network and a proponent of accountability measures, told the Washington Examiner that “it’s understandable that the department is focusing on consumer information given the political pressures.” In a blog post late Thursday, Warick wrote that the department “stressed to NCAN staff that the yet-to-be-named tools will be student focused and will include information never before released to the public.”
