The Obama administration issued a new college scorecard over the weekend, hoping to hold colleges accountable for the employability and debt repayment of their former students.
Every taxpayer or prospective student has a stake in this. College tuition rates soared 1,225 percent since 1978, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, leaving its closest competitor, medical care, behind at just 634 percent. Food rose a paltry 237 percent over that time period.
Meanwhile, student loan debt quadrupled since 2004. Forty-five percent of federally held assets are now in student loans. And as more of those loans shift to “income-based repayment,” taxpayers are covering more of the true cost.
The administration’s original plan was to grade colleges and impose sanctions on poor performers. That plan crashed and burned in a firestorm of criticism.
The new scorecard is just raw information. For any school, it shows how much graduates earn 10 years out, how many return after their first year, how many graduate on time, how much debt they take on and how many default.
Would you send your child to a school that only graduates 24 percent of its students? Would you take on debt for a school whose graduates earn 25 percent below the national average after ten years of work?
This “name and shame” strategy empowers consumers. The new scorecard tells us Utah Valley University students, for example, compare favorably with Utah State graduates in earnings 10 years out.
It’s a good step, but we still cannot see how degree programs within a school perform. This, many experts argue, is the critical piece. We know that some degree programs at lower-tier schools markedly outperform weaker programs at "better" schools. But do we know which and by how much?
In Utah County, billboards show Jason Alexander, aka George Costanza from “Seinfeld,” teaching a workshop with UVU theater students. It sounds fun. But what are the employment rates, earnings and default rates of UVU theater grads?
These numbers should be available. Using a variety of records from government agencies, they could be. And they could easily be rendered anonymous.
It’s been done. The taxpayer-supported National Technical Institute of the Deaf not long ago felt compelled to prove its worth. So it arranged with the Social Security Administration to their sift earnings and employment data. SSA blocked all personal records, but did compare the Institute’s graduates to drop-outs and those who applied but did not attend.
This could be done with graduates of any sizable program at any major college, allowing prospective students to weigh likely outcomes, comparing specific degree programs within a school and between schools.
But it won’t happen until the law changes.
In 2008, after intense lobbying from key organizations in the higher education industry — whose motives are unclear but may be surmised — Congress blocked these data from being used to inform student choice. This needs to change. With students struggling with debt and taxpayers on the hook, leaving vital performance measures off the table is bad policy.