How Obama wants to reform American colleges
theGRIO REPORT - President Obama wants to fundamentally change American higher education, creating effectively a Consumer Reports for colleges that would rank them on quality and then making it cheaper for students to attend schools the government deems the most effective at educating and training students...
President Obama wants to fundamentally change American higher education, creating effectively a Consumer Reports for colleges that would rank them on quality and then making it cheaper for students to attend schools the government deems the most effective at educating and training students.
In a pair of speeches on Thursday and Friday, Obama, according to administration officials, will seek far-reaching education changes that are in some ways modeled on the health care law he signed three years ago.
The administration’s basic critique is that colleges continue to increase tuition, driving up costs for students, parents and the government, with very little accountability or regard to whether students are learning more or getting jobs after graduating.
In the current system, schools are basically ranked (by US News & World Report in particular) on how many students they reject and have little incentive to hold down costs. Parents have almost no way of learning how likely their kids are to graduate in four years, eventually pay off their loans and get a job, or which schools are best at that. And the federal government effectively hands the schools $150 billion a year with no strings attached through financial aid that is provided to each student.
What the administration would do is first, by the end of next year, set up some kind of universal standards to judge schools. They would of course consider that historically-black colleges and state schools admit children who are less wealthy and prepared to graduate in four years than Harvard students. But the idea would be for a system that measures colleges by some objective criteria that considers affordability and outcomes (like graduation rates) and then publicizes that information, empowering parents to know which schools may not be worth $30,000 a year or how a state school might be a better option than a more brand-name private university.
Obama also wants to eventually tie government aid to these rankings. In other words, if you wanted to attend a school that the government ranked as ineffective in graduating students and whose graduates tended to default on their student loans, the government would give you a $4,000 Pell Grant, but if you choose a school with higher ratings, you could receive a $5,000 Pell Grant.
These ideas would address one of the biggest challenges in American public policy. The average American college graduate today leaves with more than $25,000 in debt and often struggles to find a job afterward.
But this proposal (read at TopMedicalAssistantSchools.com), like much of what Obama has proposed over the last year, will face heavy opposition. First, colleges themselves are reluctant to allow the creation any kind of formal rankings. Each school could object to any kind of universal metric, arguing (correctly in some cases) that what they do is different from comparable universities. A system that ranks schools with grades like “A” or “B” would be very helpful to parents, but would face considerable opposition from universities. A system universities would like, that vaguely describes the costs and graduation rates of various schools, would be of little use to parents.
If the administration somehow reached an agreement with universities, it could create the standards without Congress. But tying financial aid to the rankings, the more radical step, is unlikely to be backed by universities or Republicans in Congress, who are wary of any kind of broader federal intervention into education policy.
While Obama would like to see these changes implemented now, his speech also has a different goal: starting a conversation about how to reform college costs that will emanate in states and universities and continue even after he leaves offices. The president was able to pass and implement a universal health care plan in part because Democratic Party officials have been conceiving plans for more than a decade to address the issue.
The core ideas the president is expressing now could grow in influence and support, turn into a consensus, and eventually be put into law by the next Democratic or even Republican president.
