If the federal college-ratings system that is due out in draft form this fall creates incentives for colleges to accept fewer at-risk students, “then we will have failed,” Ted Mitchell, the recently appointed U.S. under secretary of education, said on Saturday.
Mr. Mitchell, who was confirmed in May as the Education Department’s top higher-education official, was responding to questions from reporters at an Education Writers Association conference, held here at Southern Methodist University.
The proposed ratings system that colleges are nervously awaiting will assess colleges based on measures of access, affordability, and student outcomes. The Obama administration still plans to tie federal aid to those outcomes, but not right away, Mr. Mitchell said.
In addition to making sure the data are solid, “we’re quite concerned that the ratings systems reflect and incorporate the different missions of institutions,” he said.
Creating peer groups so that comparisons among institutions are fair won’t be easy, said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education.
If you look just at small private institutions with similar enrollments in the Boston area, you’ll come up with colleges as diverse as Berklee College of Music, Olin College of Engineering, and Wellesley College, Mr. Hartle said.
An even bigger challenge, he suggested in a panel on rankings and ratings, is judging colleges in a way that doesn’t encourage them to focus recruiting on stronger students who are more likely to succeed at the expense of many poor and minority students.
“You’re going to create incentives, but you’d better make sure the incentives you’re creating are the ones you want,” Mr. Hartle said. For instance, “how do you get higher retention and graduation rates without diminishing access?”
Right to Know
Mr. Mitchell, who was the breakfast speaker on Saturday, made a point of sticking around to listen to Mr. Hartle’s panel and to answer reporters’ questions. His comments largely echoed reassurances, made last week by Deputy Under Secretary Jamienne S. Studley, that the administration was listening to skeptics.
While he acknowledged the challenges his department faces in drawing up a ratings plan that the president has promised will come out this fall, Mr. Mitchell insisted the public deserves to know which colleges are giving students the best bang for their buck and which “need to up their game.”
About half of the students who start college don’t finish, he said. “For low-income students, completion rate hovers around 1 in 10, and that’s unacceptable.”
Two of the biggest barriers, he said, are the high cost of college—the average undergraduate debt is just over $26,000, he said—and the fact that so many students start out, and get stuck, in remedial courses.
“Imagine that you arrive at college, and you’re told that you’re not starting at the starting line,” Mr. Mitchell said. “You’re starting 50 yards back,” spending Pell Grant dollars on classes that don’t count for credit, and worrying that those dollars might run out.
Mr. Mitchell, who replaced a former chancellor of and champion of community colleges, Martha J. Kanter, took pains to stress the importance of two-year colleges, which, he pointed out, account for 46 percent of current enrollment.
The administration recognizes that much of the available completion data leaves out students who transfer, making community colleges look even worse. Earnings data tend to focus on the first year after graduation, which is a poor reflection of graduates’ lifetime earnings potential. And while one of the goals of the rating system is to help students choose the best college, that is of little use to students who have only one campus within commuting distance.
“We don’t quibble with any of the issues you’ve raised,” Mr. Mitchell said after accompanying reporters and speakers in a stroll across the SMU campus. It, along with the Texas heat, “is causing me to sweat,” he said, “because these are complicated, complex issues.”
Michelle Asha Cooper, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization focused on improving access for underrepresented populations, said there should be two separate ratings systems—one for consumer information and the other for accountability. And any system should be “user friendly, accessible, and tell students information they need based on the realities of their lives.”
