By Biddy Martin. I applaud President Obama for putting the importance of a college education squarely at the center of the national agenda in his speech at the University at Buffalo, and for insisting that students get the education they need regardless of economic circumstances. He is right to insist on greater clarity in how colleges and the government inform prospective students and their families about the net price of attendance, the availability of financial aid, student debt, and graduation rates. Holding institutions accountable for providing a quality education and helping graduates with reasonable loan-repayment policies are not only legitimate but essential. His emphasis on value will bring much-needed attention to the question of how we define, measure, and reward it. More...

By Megan O'Neil. Developing online classes and other nontraditional teaching approaches could earn colleges money under new federal financing priorities proposed on Thursday by President Obama. More colleges should be encouraged “to embrace innovative new ways to prepare our students for a 21st-century economy and maintain a high level of quality without breaking the bank,” the president said in a speech at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York. The financial rewards for such innovation would be part of a larger retooling of financing priorities, Mr. Obama said. Under his proposal, the Department of Education would have two years to create a college-rating system to help students and their parents determine the value of an institution. More...

The White House on Thursday morning released details of President Obama’s plan to make college more affordable, with a proposal that seeks to measure colleges’ performance through a new ratings system. Following are highlights of a White House fact sheet on Mr. Obama’s plan, released in advance of his speech at the University at Buffalo that will address college affordability:
• Before the 2015 academic year, the U.S. Department of Education will “develop a new ratings system to help students compare the value offered by colleges and encourage colleges to improve. These ratings will compare colleges with similar missions and identify colleges that do the most to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds as well as colleges that are improving their performance.” The ratings will be based on factors including access, such as the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants; affordability, such as average tuition rates; and outcomes, such as graduation rates and graduates’ earnings.
• The results, the White House said, will be published on the department’s College Scorecard, which itself was met with mixed reviews from many in higher education.
• The plan seeks eventually to tie financial aid to the results of the new rating system: “In the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the president will seek legislation allocating financial aid based on these college ratings by 2018, once the ratings system is well established. Students can continue to choose whichever college they want, but taxpayer dollars will be steered toward high-performing colleges that provide the best value.”
• According to the White House fact sheet, Mr. Obama will seek to reward colleges with a bonus for the number of Pell Grant recipients they graduate, and to require colleges with high dropout rates to disburse Pell Grants over the course of the semester, rather than in lump sums at the beginning of the semester.
The White House’s fact sheet also said that Mr. Obama would challenge colleges to embrace certain higher-education innovations as a way to drive down costs, including competency-based programs, massive open online courses, popularly known as MOOCs, and “flipped” classrooms.
Read the whole thing here, and follow along as The Chronicle gathers reactions to the president’s proposals from higher education throughout the day.

By Paul Basken. Not long after he proposed giving researchers $100-million to improve fundamental understandings of brain function, President Obama was worried. How, Mr. Obama asked his bioethics commission last month, might improved technologies for reading the brain affect society in areas that include personal privacy, moral and legal accountability, stigmatization, discrimination, and measures of intelligence?
On Tuesday the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues began tackling that question. And, at least on its first pass at the subject, it largely counseled calm. More...

By Beckie Supiano. Twenty-six percent of high-school graduates who took the ACT in 2013 met all four of its college-readiness benchmarks, according to a report released on Wednesday by ACT Inc., the organization that administers the test. The benchmarks were designed by ACT to indicate the minimum scores needed on each subject it tests to signify a 50-percent chance of earning a B or higher, or a 75-percent chance of earning a C or higher, in corresponding first-year college courses. The report, “The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2013,” considers the scores of the 54 percent of 2013 high-school graduates—about 1.8 million people—who took the ACT. More...

By Kelly Field. President Obama continues his three-campus "college cost" bus tour on Friday, promoting his plans to make college more affordable through a mix of carrots and sticks. The heart of the proposals is a controversial plan to rate colleges based on measures of access, affordability, and student outcomes, and to allocate aid based on those ratings. Under the plan, students attending higher-rated institutions could obtain larger Pell Grants and more-affordable loans. The Obama administration and its supporters say the ratings would empower consumers with fresh information and would pressure colleges to keep costs down. They describe a "datapalooza," in which prospective students would be able to compare institutions on measures such as debt levels, graduation and transfer rates, and graduates' earnings. More...

By Goldie Blumenstyk. President Obama took a swipe at law schools and for-profit colleges on Friday, the second day of his college bus tour, suggesting that legal education could be just as effective if it took two years rather than three, and assailing proprietary colleges that leave students in debt and ill prepared for a job.
At some for-profit colleges, students are "loaded down with enormous debt," said Mr. Obama, speaking at a Binghamton University town-hall event. "They can't find a job. They default. The taxpayer ends up holding the bag. Their credit is ruined, and the for-profit institution is making out like a bandit. That's a problem." More...

By Dan Berrett, Goldie Blumenstyk, Sara Lipka, Marc Parry, and Beckie Supiano. Many of the ideas embraced by President Obama in his call to control college costs have longstanding champions in major foundations and among prominent policy analysts. The president's plan dovetails closely with the agendas of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has spent $472-million to remake college education in the United States, and of the Lumina Foundation, the largest private foundation devoted solely to higher education. Many features of the president's plan have been advocated, too, in the research and analysis of the New America Foundation's education-policy program. The Gates Foundation and its major grantees have focused, for example, on the idea of tying aid for colleges to their performance, a cornerstone of the president's plan. At the state level, Gates grantees like Complete College America and Jobs for the Future have been pushing efforts to tie colleges' budgets to factors like graduation rates. And at the federal level, the foundation's Reimagining Aid Design and Delivery project has supported research on using financial aid as a lever to improve student success. More...

Blog Educpros de Pierre Dubois. Samuel Bliman, professeur des universités en retraite et fidèle lecteur du blog, fait sa rentrée. Lecteur assidu de la presse anglo-saxonne, il vient de me communiquer un article de Nick Anderson et Philip Rucker, publié dans le Washington Post du 22 août 2013. Obama proposes college-rating system that could increase affordability. Le président des États-Unis est mécontent de la détérioration des études dans les Colleges, premier niveau de l’enseignement supérieur. Selon lui, l’économie de la connaissance exige une progression du nombre d’étudiants qui obtiennent un diplôme du supérieur. Mais celle-ci se heurte à un certain nombre d’obstacles dont le coût de plus en plus élevé des études (8.600 dollars en moyenne dans les Public Colleges qui ont un cycle de 4 ans) ; la conséquence en est une progression de l’endettement moyen des étudiants au terme de leurs études (26.000 dollars). Suite...

By Audrey Watters. President Obama unveiled what Techcrunch describes as a “radical education plan” that “could finally disrupt higher education.” Once you stop laughing your ass off at this breathlessly ludicrous headline (remember when the same author said that the Udacity/San Jose State deal would “end higher education as we know it”?), feel free to take a closer look at the actual details of the President's plan for higher education, which include “pay for performance,” a new ratings system that would be tied to federal financial aid, more competency-based credits, more technology, less regulation and other things that sound a heckuva lot like what’s been happening in K–12 for years now and (SHOCKING I KNOW) a lot like the Gates Foundation’s ed reform agenda. Considering that Congress seems more obsessed with voting (again) on repealing Obamacare, these plans seem likely to move forward only with executive, not legislative, action. More...