President Obama unveiled a plan last week to make government "scorecards" for every college in the country. The initiative aims to deliver on a promise Obama made in his State of the Union address to make higher education more affordable for American families.
The scorecards would include vital statistics about each university, listing their graduation rates, tuition costs, graduate earning potential and average student loan debt. Though this data is all publicly available to anyone who looks hard enough, this is the first attempt to collect all the relevant information into a single location.
In other words, after years of U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review and Newsweek publishing their highly controversial opinions of what the best schools in the country are, someone has finally decided to provide an empirical system to help answer the question on every high school senior's mind: where should I go to college?
The government rating system could provide the first ever truly objective catalogue of college-related information. The closest thing to it now is perhaps the College Board, but most of the data the College Board provides concerns admissions statistics; its financial data is not nearly comprehensive enough.
When making their college decision, students rely too often on information provided by the colleges themselves, which can be misleading, because schools might be motivated to overstate the generosity of their financial aid and the earnings of their graduates. And the popularity of ranking systems like the one published by U.S. News & World Report are not at all commensurate with their usefulness, because those rankings rely too heavily on measures of prestige and too little on more important factors like average student loan debt.
It's very easy for families to get caught up in the glitz and glamour of a top spot in the "best colleges" edition of a magazine and not investigate the financial and job statistics associated with the school. Every senior dreams of that Ivy League acceptance letter for a variety of reasons, but chances are most of those reasons aren't based on statistics. Many will say they want in because of the school's "great reputation." Some will talk about more important reasons like the strength of the curriculum and the social atmosphere on campus.
These are important factors, to be sure, but do they justify the $50,000+ price tag that they often come with? Whether or not they do differs for every student, and the government scorecard can deliver much of the necessary information to answer it objectively, without the hype that a magazine or a college website provides.
The proposal is ultimately designed to help families with financial planning, something that is gradually becoming the deciding factor in college selection for many students. With tuition prices increasing every year, students are being forced to limit their options. The long-term costs of higher education can easily be deceptive, and it's easy for families to get in over their heads without the proper information in front of them.
Stories of nightmarishly high student debt that cripples graduates' finances well into middle adulthood have become ubiquitous in the United States. Too many families simply don't understand the enormity of the financial burden that sending a child to college entails. This initiative stands to make the complex charges and fees of higher education more reader-friendly and more easily accessible for students and families throughout the country. Hopefully, this will ultimately lead to better financial planning, and fewer disasters associated with overwhelming student loan debt.
