The U.S. Department of Education recently released a new version of its College Scorecard, an online database DOE says will help students and their parents choose the best option among the thousands of colleges available in the United States today. A careful examination of the College Scorecard reveals, however, that it’s nothing more than another costly and potentially harmful government program.
The College Scorecard has been a highly publicized part of President Barack Obama’s new set of education initiatives. DOE created the College Scorecard more than two years ago as an Internet-based platform that would provide prospective undergraduate and graduate students information about the costs and program offerings of more than 3,500 colleges across the nation.
When critics noted at its launch that the initial version included basic information only, officials operating the College Scorecard announced that they planned a significant update that would give students much more useful information, such as employment data.
Obama packaged the release of the College Scorecard with a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, in September, during Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s sixth annual “Back to School” tour. At the event, Obama warned that Republicans weren’t prioritizing education issues and that new programs, such as the College Scorecard, will help alleviate the nation’s student debt crisis.
Obama’s claims are not supported by the facts. Under Obama’s administration, student loan debt has skyrocketed and college tuition has risen to unprecedented levels, even while the nation has been stuck with sluggish economic growth (at best). The College Scorecard is just another one of Obama’s failed endeavors.
The College Scorecard is a useful tool, in theory, but numerous private college ranking and statistic systems are already in place that offer information the Scorecard doesn’t, making the College Scorecard a pointless government program. Any student or prospective student who has used one of the popular private college ranking systems lately has to be wondering why the Obama administration would waste significant money and time to create an ugly-cousin college evaluation system.
The most notable current college evaluation tool is U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of best colleges and institutions, but the Princeton Review’s college search tool also gives prospective college data similar to the information the College Scorecard produces.
The College Scorecard says it provides students with data from more than 3,500 institutions around the country, but how does this improve higher education when there is already so much good data available? Further, many higher education leaders have criticized the scorecard for giving a false impression of how colleges compare with one another.
For instance, one of the so-called useful features of the College Scorecard that actually misleads students is an estimate of the median salary undergraduates earn after college at particular schools. For example, according to the federal government, ten years after their first day of college, graduates of Golden Gate University earn an average of $64,200. Ten years after entering the University of California-Los Angeles, graduates earn an average salary of $59,200.
Based on the data presented by DOE, students appear to be better off at Golden Gate University than at UCLA, but every single college guide in the nation praises UCLA as one of the best public universities in the nation, and experts agree UCLA is a much more competitive school than Golden Gate University.
The reason UCLA looks inferior on paper is that most of Golden Gate University’s graduates stay in the San Francisco area, where the school is located, after graduation, and San Francisco is one of the most expensive places in the country to live. Thus GGU’s graduates tend to bring in higher incomes. Relative to the cost of living, UCLA is a much better deal, but that’s not the picture the College Scorecard presents.
This problem exists in virtually every market the scorecard covers, making universities across the country that are renowned for educational quality look worse than they actually are. When data is provided without a comprehensive ranking that takes into account simple but important variables, such as cost of living and quality of education, many exceptional, affordable schools may be placed at a great disadvantage compared to urban private schools.
The College Scorecard is not as useful as existing resources that don’t waste taxpayers’ money, and there are still many questions that need to be asked: How much is this effort really costing the taxpayers? How will this scorecard change what people consider to be a good college? Instead of cutting the national college debt, will the scorecard encourage students to go to expensive schools that appear to offer much higher salaries?
With its College Scorecard, the Obama administration has created an unnecessary and potentially harmful program that intrudes on an otherwise thriving, albeit imperfect, market.
Michael McGrady is studying political science and criminal justice at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs and has previously worked for the U.S. Department of Defense and numerous political campaigns. Justin Haskins ([email protected]) is editor of the Heartland Institute, a leading free-market, pro-liberty think tank. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
