Mr. President: Don’t Cave to the Higher-Education Lobby

By Sara Goldrick-Rab. Over all, I’m a fan of President Obama’s proposal to rate colleges and link the results to financial aid. The plan is to give students attending institutions rated high—on such measures as tuition and graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and the percentage of low-income students enrolled—larger grants, as well as lower-interest loans. The proposal ends the “tinkering” that most higher-education reform has pursued; it aims squarely at the main drivers of college costs: private and for-profit institutions (and their happy followers, the elite public flagships) and states. That is the approach my colleagues and I argued for in a recent paper for the American Enterprise Institute. More...