Colleges Rattled

Colleges Rattled as Obama Seeks Rating System

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

The college presidents were appalled. Not only had President Obama called for a government rating system for their schools, but now one of his top education officials was actually suggesting it would be as easy as evaluating a kitchen appliance.

“It’s like rating a blender,” Jamienne Studley, a deputy under secretary at the Education Department, said to the college presidents after a meeting in the department’s Washington headquarters in November, according to several who were present. “This is not so hard to get your mind around.”

The rating system is in fact a radical new effort by the federal government to hold America’s 7,000 colleges and universities accountable by injecting the executive branch into the business of helping prospective students weigh collegiate pros and cons. For years that task has been dominated by private companies like Barron’s and U.S. News & World Report.

Mr. Obama and his aides say colleges and universities that receive a total of $150 billion each year in federal loans and grants must prove they are worth it. The problem is acute, they insist: At too many schools, tuition is going up, graduation rates are going down, and students are leaving with enormous debt and little hope of high-paying jobs.

The idea that the government would try to rate the schools has rattled the entire higher education system, from elite private institutions to large state universities to community colleges.

“Applying a sledgehammer to the whole system isn’t going to work,” said Robert G. Templin Jr., the president of Northern Virginia Community College. “They think their vision of higher education is the only one.” Many college leaders accuse the president of grasping for a simplistic solution to what they call a crisis of soaring tuition.

The rating system, which the president called for in a speech last year and is under development, would compare schools on factors like how many of their students graduate, how much debt their students accumulate and how much money their students earn after graduating. Ultimately, Mr. Obama wants Congress to agree to use the ratings to allocate the billions in federal student loans and grants. Schools that earn a high rating on the government’s list would be able to offer more student aid than schools at the bottom.

Many college presidents said a rating system like the one being considered at the White House would elevate financial concerns above academic ones and would punish schools with liberal arts programs and large numbers of students who major in programs like theater arts, social work or education, disciplines that do not typically lead to lucrative jobs.

They also predicted that institutions that serve minority and low-income students, many of whom come from underfunded schools and have had less college preparation, would rank lowest in a new rating system, hurting the very populations the president says he wants to help.

William E. Kirwan, the chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said Mr. Obama’s desire to hold down costs and improve graduation rates is a “noble effort.” But he questioned the wisdom of trying to create a rating system. “It’s hard for me to imagine how that can work,” said Dr. Kirwan, who is known as Brit.

But officials said Mr. Obama was determined to shake up a system that he has said costs too much and often provides too little value.

“We have a financial and moral obligation to be good stewards of these dollars,” Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, said in an interview. He said schools often did a poor job of providing information to prospective students and their parents, making the choice of a college complicated. “To defend the status quo, for me, you can’t do that.”

The cost of attending public and private colleges continues to significantly outpace earnings growth in the United States. Tuition, room and board at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., one of the most expensive schools in the nation, will approach $65,000 in the next academic year. Costs will be about $60,000 at Stanford and more than $50,000 for out-of-state students at the University of Michigan.

White House officials said the government rating system would provide new incentives for colleges to hold down costs and broaden access to a more diverse student population — and provide an alternative to the private rankings, where colleges often battle for spots by erecting lavish new athletic centers and libraries and by becoming more selective in whom they admit. The officials said Mr. Obama’s system would not rank schools numerically but would give them grades or ratings like “excellent,” “good,” “fair” or “poor.”

“He is not interested in driving anybody out of business, unless they are poorly serving the American people,” said Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. “In which case, I think he’s probably pretty comfortable with that.”

In interviews, several college presidents expressed deep reservations about the idea.

“As with many things, the desire to solve a complicated problem in what feels like a simple way can capture people’s imagination,” said Adam F. Falk, the president of Williams College in Massachusetts. Dr. Falk said the danger of a rating system is that information about the colleges is likely to be “oversimplified to the point that it actually misleads.”

Charles L. Flynn Jr., the president of the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx, said a rating system for colleges is a bad idea that “cannot be done well.” He added, pointedly, “I find this initiative uncharacteristically clueless.”

Schools vary widely in the information they collect about the earnings of their graduates — some conduct surveys and do polling — but the college presidents said no school can mandate that graduates supply the statistics. Several college presidents said they were open to the idea of the government’s requiring more information about tuition increases, graduation rates, the amount of debt their students incur and the success of their graduates in the work force. But most said they were extremely uncomfortable with the idea of a government rating system based on those metrics.

“We think that entire approach is quite wrongheaded,” said Kenneth W. Starr, the president of Baylor University in Waco, Tex., and the prosecutor of the Whitewater investigation of President Bill Clinton.

Ms. Muñoz, Mr. Duncan and other top officials have held numerous meetings with college presidents, students and others to seek input. Some, like Nancy L. Zimpher, the chancellor of the State University of New York system, are supportive.

“I don’t have a problem with the government incentivizing a focus on access and completion when that’s my core mission,” Dr. Zimpher said. She said, however, that some data about graduation rates and postgraduate earnings were incomplete and would have to be improved.

Ms. Muñoz said officials were aware of those concerns and were taking them into consideration as they developed what she called a “version 1.0” of a rating system, which could be unveiled by the end of the year.

In a blog post on the Education Department website last week, Ms. Studley wrote that they were listening to the concerns of college presidents, who insist that any system must “thoughtfully measure indicators like earnings, to avoid overemphasizing income or first jobs, penalizing relatively lower paid and public service careers, or minimizing the less tangible benefits of a college education.”

But officials said Mr. Obama had repeatedly told his advisers that he was determined not to let college presidents off the hook. Aides said that after the president pledged to deal with rising college costs in his 2013 State of the Union address, he kept rejecting policy ideas as too timid and demanded tougher proposals.

“This is a system which perpetuates itself, and is moving in a direction which is unsustainable for the American people,” Ms. Muñoz said.

Some college presidents accused Mr. Obama and his top aides of being obstinate.

“This is a take-it-or-leave-it approach,” said Tracy Fitzsimmons, the president of Shenandoah University in Virginia.

Ms. Muñoz countered that Mr. Obama had no patience for anyone who attempted to block the effort.

“For those who are making the argument that we shouldn’t do this, I think those folks could fairly have the impression that we’re not listening,” Ms. Muñoz said. “There is an element to this conversation which is, ‘We hope to God you don’t do this.’ Our answer to that is: ‘This is happening.’ ”