President Obama announced a plan last week to establish a new set of college rankings that measure factors like affordability, graduation rates, the average starting salaries for graduates, and the percentage of lower-income students who attend. The proposal says that the higher a college ranks, the more federal financial aid they’ll receive to award to incoming students.
If I could have put myself in the cabinet room last week, I know exactly what I’d have said: Mr. President, don't do it.
Higher education access and affordability is a problem that needs to be addressed yesterday. But yet another ranking system, especially one with federal aid attached to the results—that’s not the answer.
The moment you tie rankings and money to educational outcomes, colleges will be under enormous pressure to save their schools and their jobs. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing if rankings couldn’t be so easily manipulated. It’s too easy and too tempting to juke the stats.
If you think I’m being cynical, look at what the ridiculous US News rankings have done to college admissions. Colleges have become marketing machines, spending millions of dollars to drive up their applications, which subsequently allows them to reject more students. Many reward kids who can afford to visit or otherwise demonstrate that they’re more likely to enroll. A few colleges have even lied about their admitted students’ average SAT scores. They didn’t do those things because it improves the education they deliver—they've done it to raise their rankings.
Comparing colleges using a standard set of criteria assumes that all colleges are the same. They’re not. Why should we expect the University of Chicago and Cal State Northridge to be ranked (and subsequently rewarded or punished) using exactly the same criteria? They have entirely different missions and serve very different populations of students. It's like tying every NFL team's available budget to how many touchdowns they score each season. It sounds good in theory, but it doesn't necessarily win more games.
If a college is rewarded simply for being cheaper, how many programs will be cut because they’re not considered essential? Why not hire professors simply because they’ll come cheap? Why bother to have a trained expert on campus that students who need emotional counseling can visit? Why offer majors that are less popular or bother to bring the library up to 21st century research standards? “Too expensive—it’ll hurt our rankings.”
If colleges are rewarded for the average starting salary of their graduates, why would they admit kids who want to be teachers, social workers or directors of non-profits?
If they’re rewarded for graduation rates, why go out of their way to recruit more underserved or first-generation students who are statistically less likely to graduate?
Yes, we need to make college more affordable. We need to address that the cost of attending college has gone up faster than wages have. We need to stop students from taking on so much debt to attend college that they’ll spend the rest of their lives trying to repay it. We need to make it easy for families to access public information so that they can make smart decisions about which colleges to attend and how much they can reasonably afford to spend.
But the moment you tie federal aid to college outcomes, you’re rewarding statistics. And statistics only tell part of the story. Action, yes. But please, no more rankings.
Breanne Boyle says
I think Terry poses a great question, and I have a thought that is probably controversial. I think we actually need to stop giving out as much aid as we do currently.
Here is why: College costs have gone up exponentially in the last 30 years, and aid has risen with it. Why should a college cost less if banks and the government are just going to give bigger loans? It mirrors the housing crisis. If the cost of college just becomes too steep for anyone to afford, I think we will see a drop in prices, but not if there are loans out there that will allow students to take on the debt of $60k (or more) per year.
Now, I think this could lead to the possibility that elite colleges would remain expensive and others would drop prices For example, Harvard could retain their prices because they already cater to upper-middle and upper class, so why drop the cost when their students can afford it anyway? That’s a crummy outcome to what I am saying, but I think it could be worth it, if it meant more students could access more education. Besides, no one gets into Harvard anyway. 🙂