To recap yesterday’s blog: President Obama has a plan to make colleges reduce their costs, and deliver better value for money.  It involves having the government rate institutions on Accessibility, Affordability, and Outcomes; those which rate poorly risk losing eligibility for various forms of federal student aid (which, in total, is up around $150 billion/year these days).

While there’s no question that college costs do need to be reined in, this particular solution strikes me as odd.  Here’s what you have to believe in order to think that the President’s plan will work:

1)      That there exists a set of metrics, applicable to all institutions, which can measure Accessibility, Affordability, and Outcomes.  Forget data availability, institutions juking the stats, and whether one should judge institutions based on graduate salaries – can this stuff actually be measured in an equitable manner?  Will universities be judged on affordability without reference to the amount of state aid they receive?  Will those in rich states be penalized for the number of Pell-eligible students they enrol because there are fewer of them around than in, say, Alabama?  For employment rates or salaries, do tribal colleges or HCBUs get measured on the same scale as Princeton?  And if you’re looking at university-wide comparisons, rather than program-level ones, won’t mid-tier liberal arts colleges get completely blown out of the water?  There are probably work-arounds on most of these, but they aren’t simple.  Which leads to the next issue:

2)      Assuming the answer to 1) is yes, that the government is actually capable of finding and choosing the right measures.  I’m skeptical, let’s put it that way.

3)      That the Government, at the end of the day, is prepared to take students hostage to make this work.  Does anyone really believe that the government is going to reach the point where it says to a group of students: “we’re with you, your school isn’t delivering good value.  To show you our support, we’re going to cut off your student aid”?  The words “communications nightmare” don’t even begin to cover it.

This last one really speaks to a large problem with the Obama program.  The US federal government actually doesn’t have the tools to affect affordability because it doesn’t control the appropriations process.  At the end of the day, it’s a state issue, as it would be here in Canada.

So is this just an elaborate set-up to allow Obama to use the bully pulpit to jawbone institutions into line?  Or does the White House (and it is the White House – DOE appears to have had little to do with this) actually believe that there is a workable technocratic solution here? I’d like to think the former; I’m afraid it’s the latter.