Ratings Are Not So Easy

By Karen Gross. On his education bus tour, President Obama is urging, among other suggestions, a new rating system to ensure that more families are able to afford higher education. I think we can all (well, almost all of us) agree that the rising costs of a bachelor’s degree need to be constrained, and we must find ways that facilitate middle- and lower-income students entering and graduating from college. The value proposition matters, and “debt without diploma” is unacceptable. What is vastly harder to agree upon is how to address the problem, rather than just wringing our hands over it -- which we have been doing for far too long. Read more...