Will Federal College Ratings Be the New Way to Find a School?

Every fall, students around the country look for a college or university that is a fit with their academic interests, activity preferences, and financial means. While searching, many students check college ranking lists done by Time Magazine, Forbes, or U.S News to see which schools are rated highly.

Recently, President Obama introduced an ambitious plan to evaluate and rank schools based on factors such as tuition, graduation rate, student debt, and financial demographics. His goal with this system is to make college more affordable for middle class American families. According to this system, need-based federal grants would be given to students attending the universities with the highest ratings.  This new rating system, in addition to the existing rating systems, leaves an overwhelming amount of information from which student must evaluate. Which lists should students use as their primary decision-making tool? 

The average cost of public colleges and universities is climbing more than double the inflation rate, making it understandable why the Obama Administration wants to help find a solution to making college more accessible. The average student now graduates with more than $26,000 of debt. While at the same time, loan interest rates are not improving.  It’s clear that something needs to change, but I’m not sure this plan is the answer.

After reading more about President Obama’s plan, I began to wonder how the program would achieve its goal of making college more affordable. Would a school be willing to risk disrupting its current business model to reduce costs and receive a higher rating? This is quite a gamble for the schools in need of revenue. By reducing tuition costs, they would actually lose revenue relying on an uncertain and potentially small amount of federal funding. Additionally, this will force the price of private schools to decrease dramatically, which may cause the closing of schools with smaller endowments. Does this plan need modification? Should it be totally scrapped?