Everyone Wants to Measure the Value of College. Now the Gates Foundation Wants a Say.

Perhaps never before has there been such a need for postsecondary credentials but such skepticism about whether a college education is worth the cost. That, according to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is the paradox that prompted it to create a national research group, to be publicly convened on Thursday.

The Commission on the Value of Postsecondary Education is the latest national effort to measure and seek to convey clearly just how much someone gains — economically, anyway — from a college credential.

The goal is to provide useful, understandable information to help colleges “take a critical look at how and how well they are contributing to economic opportunity for today’s students; aid policy makers in gauging what the public gets for its investment in higher education; and equip students and families as they consider where and what to study,” the foundation said in announcing the commission.

Gates officials say the result will be more comprehensive than existing measures, like the College Scorecard, a program introduced by the Obama administration as a way to help increase transparency in higher education.

The federal scorecard looks at institution-level data, while the new commission will break down the economic benefits by program. It will also focus more on equity than existing efforts do, said Sue Desmond-Hellman, chief executive officer of the foundation and a co-chair of the commission.

“As the cost of a credential rises, and student debt goes to record levels, people are actually asking a question I never thought I’d hear: ‘Is going to college a reliable path to economic opportunity?’” she said during a news-media call to introduce the new commission. “This question of value needs to be addressed, and we feel that it needs to be addressed urgently.”

Among the questions the commission will try to help students and parents answer: Are graduates better off compared with their peers who stopped at high school? Which degrees offer the best increases in earnings?

The commission is made up of 30 leaders from inside and outside education, including college and university officials, researchers, students, and business and nonprofit leaders.

It will focus on the economic returns of college, while recognizing that “there are real and significant noneconomic returns,” including critical-thinking skills, better health, and a greater chance of turning out at the voting booth.

The commission, which started working last month, plans by mid-2020 to propose a definition of postsecondary value, create a way to measure how programs at specific colleges create value for students, and identify gaps by race, ethnicity, income, and gender.

It will look at a range of ways to measure the economic benefits of a certificate or degree. Those will include:

• How much students earn after graduating and how that affects their ability to pay off their college loans.
• How much more money students with certificates or degrees earn, compared with those who end their education at high school.
• How much those credentials help students move to a higher income bracket.

Skeptics contend that there’s already plenty of consumer information out there — too much, some argue — to allow people to make informed decisions about college without drowning in a sea of data.

‘Relevant, Actionable Information’

Recent research has found that the College Scorecard appeared to influence application behavior only among more-affluent students and made no statistical difference in where students enrolled. That raised questions about whether giving students more information might actually widen equity gaps between those affluent students and those who need the information most but might not see it.

A co-chair of the new commission said its report would be different. “This cannot and must not be done like any other report that we’ve heard that goes right to the shelf and no one uses it,” said Mildred Garcia, president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. The commission’s goal is to produce “relevant, actionable information to help people make decisions,” she said.

The program-level data called for by the Gates effort would include former students’ median earnings, debt levels, and loan repayments. Most of that information is already available to consumers, but it’s spread out over various websites, including College Navigator and the College Salary Report. The College Board issues a report every three years on the value of a college education.

The goals of increasing transparency even made their way into an executive order on campus free speech issued in March by President Trump, who directed colleges to add new information to the College Scorecard.

And income mobility is the focus of research by Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist who pioneered a method for measuring how much colleges nationwide provide access to low-income students and offer opportunities of upward mobility.

Gates officials acknowledge Chetty’s work. A child born into the bottom-20-percent income level is three times as likely to reach the top-40-percent level with a postsecondary education, the Gates announcement noted. For Americans today, it said, “education after high school is not a luxury; it’s a necessity.”

As the focus of reform efforts has shifted in recent years from expanding access to expanding success in college, more attention now is being paid to the return on investment, the announcement said.

Commission leaders hope their research will influence faltering efforts to reauthorize the federal law governing higher education.

But even if those efforts fail, “better definitions of a college’s or program’s value will certainly be used by states to help allocate funding, and college-access organizations and rankings providers will also be interested in the findings,” Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of education leadership at Seton Hall University, told The Chronicle after learning of the commission’s announcement.

“But one thing is worth emphasizing — the panel is unlikely to bring down the price tag of a college education,” he said. “Instead, it is focusing on whether programs are worth the price tag.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.