Linking college ratings to federal funding is a good idea in theory, but it’s a bit more complicated in practice.
Recently the U.S. Department of Education released a framework for a college ratings system that would score colleges and distribute funding based on those ratings. It says it has chosen to create broad ratings that place colleges into three groups: the highest achieving, the middle of the pack and the lowest achieving.
While the set of criteria is not yet finalized, the expected criteria includes: expected family contribution, average net price, graduation rates, labor market success in the short and long term, graduate school attendance and loan performance outcomes. There is no measure of academic quality or rigor beyond graduation rates.
These ratings are good because, unlike other sites on similar information, they are regulated by the government. They will be trusted and useful resources for high school students and families researching colleges to attend. The U.S. Department of Education specified that it wants to avoid “ranking” the institutions with a false sense of accuracy.
But it is neither fair nor constructive to compare a college with a high-income student body such as an Ivy League college against a low-income one such as a state school. Each is important and each serves its respective purpose: Some schools are focused on research and some are focused on teaching; some schools are meant to serve students trying to get a cheap public degree to better their own opportunities and others to serve students who want elite degrees. The ratings and accountability of the rating system are a good idea, but every college serves a different purpose and it is unfair to judge colleges that operate for different purposes on the same criteria without accounting for that.
So, to make an accurate assessment of the diverse array of colleges in the U.S., some of the most important things for the U.S. Department of Education to consider are criteria such as income, expressed mission of the school, quality of high school and whether or not a student is the first in his or her family to go to college.
One method of accounting for the differences in mission and demographics would be to consider the number of low-income students at the university, and what portion of them graduate. The current criteria do include measures that account for differences in demographics of students, but it is not yet clear how those scores will be accounted for in the overall rating.
These differences should be made clear in the public ratings and should be taken into account for funding. A college that is less academically achieving and less advantaged but successful considering its expressed mission and the students that it serves should not be penalized in the ratings or funding for doing its job.
Another potential drawback is that the ratings may increase pressure on colleges to increase graduation rates to improve their scores. This could be done by reducing graduation requirements, which would be a disservice to students. Colleges may also start mimicking other schools that are scoring well in order to improve their own rating, despite the possibly adverse affects those changes may have on their student bodies.
On the other hand, the rating system could also incentivize colleges to augment their programs for students at risk of failing. That positive outcome is most likely if the criteria in the rating system appropriately judge schools according to their expressed mission.
The stakes of these ratings are higher than other existing ratings because it has been proposed that funding be attached to them.
Because the ratings will be released the upcoming academic year, and funding won’t be attached to them until 2018, there is time to correct mistakes in criteria or judgments before there are financial ramifications for the school.
The funding that would be affected by this rating system would be relatively small, said Carolyn Henrich, the University of California Office of the President’s Legislative Director of Education.
Ratings are a good idea but very complex. Many things need to be considered as the federal government moves forward with this proposal. The mission of the college and the demographics of the student body are imperative to accurate ratings.
The author has completely misconstrued the function of these ratings. They are not designed to provide students with rankings, only with data to help students make a sound financial decision. If this was directed to a rankings agency, such as U.S. News or Times, then it would be appropriate. It would be fully logical to urge them to have more comprehensive rankings. Instead, the author is urging the U.S. Department of Education to do something that it is inappropriate for a government agency to do.
But suppose for the sake of argument that the author was successful in getting the DoE to include data regarding “academic quality or rigor beyond graduation rates”. Does this mean that currently underperforming, underfunded colleges in, for example, inner-cities with poor faculty or course unavailability due to that lack of funding, should have that annotated in their data which would affect their rating? The rating that will determine how much funding it receives?
The rating should stick to its primary function: helping students determine whether attending a particular university will be cost-effective. If students are looking to the government to provide data on where to find the best academic programs, then they haven’t looked hard enough.
On another note, the author has not done her due diligence. Many of her concerns are directly addressed by Secretary Duncan. There are even fact sheets on ED.gov.