For the second year in a row, President Obama used his State of the Union address to take colleges to task over rising tuition, warning that “taxpayers can’t keep subsidizing higher and higher and higher costs for higher education.”
“Colleges must do their part to keep costs down, and it’s our job to make sure that they do,” he said in his speech, the first of his second term. He called on Congress “to change the Higher Education Act so that affordability and value are included in determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid.”
On the heels of his speech, the White House released an online College Scorecard that will allow students to compare colleges, and a policy paper that proposes a possible “alternative system of accreditation” for higher education.
The president first proposed the scorecard last year, in a speech at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and a preliminary version was released in June. The online interactive tool is designed to help users gather information about individual colleges and compare them to similar institutions by providing data on costs, potential earnings, and average student-loan debt.
“We know students and families are often overwhelmed in the college-search process—but feel they lack the tools to sort through the information and decide which school is right for them,” the U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan, said in a written statement.
Plans call for the scorecard to provide information about what kinds of jobs students at different institutions get when they graduate, and the average earnings of former students who took out federal student loans. The current version, which is similar to the preliminary version released last year, offers neither type of data. The U.S. Department of Education plans to publish information on potential earnings in the coming year, according to the statement.
Better Accountability
President Obama didn’t mention accreditation in his speech. But in a supplemental document released afterward, he made it clear that he is seeking major changes in the accountability system for higher education.
In the middle of the nine-page document, “The President’s Plan for a Strong Middle Class and a Strong America,” Mr. Obama laid out his broad intent to hold “colleges accountable for cost, value, and quality,” including a call to set benchmarks for affordability and student outcomes as criteria for receiving federal student financial aid. Regional and national accreditors are now the primary gatekeepers for access to those dollars.
New benchmarks could be incorporated “into the existing accreditation system,” the plan states, or created “by establishing a new, alternative system of accreditation that would provide pathways for higher-education models and colleges to receive federal student aid based on performance and results.”
Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which represents some 3,000 accredited colleges and more than 60 accrediting organizations, said the president’s proposals were completely unexpected. “I was, at first, startled,” she said. “How did accreditation make it into the supplemental materials for the State of the Union?”
President Obama is not, however, the first to suggest that the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act could include significant accreditation reform, Ms. Eaton said.
Earlier this year, when a federal panel recommended some modest changes in the accreditation system, a minority of that panel proposed more sweeping reforms, including separating the accreditation process from eligibility for federal student aid.
A new pathway to accreditation might be based on more consumer-friendly information, like graduation rates, job placements, and salaries, Ms. Eaton said, but it wouldn’t necessarily deal with core issues of academic quality that employers are also concerned about, such as critical-thinking skills.
“What this means for accreditation, we don’t really know,” Ms. Eaton said of the president’s plan, “but a new system of accreditation that is government-run is a concern.”
Recalling Sputnik
The president’s speech came less than three weeks before deep cuts in discretionary spending are scheduled to take effect through a process known as “sequestration.” Unless Congress acts to avert the cuts by March 1, spending on defense and nondefense programs will be cut by 5 percent across the board.
In recent weeks, some Congressional Republicans have suggested limiting the defense cuts in favor of steeper cuts in other programs. Mr. Obama rejected that idea, saying, “We won’t grow the middle class simply by shifting the cost of health care or college onto families that are already struggling, or by forcing communities to lay off more teachers, cops, and firefighters.”
He also called for continued spending on research. “Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation,” he said. “Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race.”
The president also called for comprehensive immigration reform, but he did not specifically mention the Dream Act—legislation that would provide a path to citizenship for college students who are in the country illegally. Mr. Obama has backed a Senate plan that would create a faster route to citizenship for such students.
The Republican response to this year’s address came from Sen. Marco Rubio, a Tea Party favorite who has been active on immigration reform. Like the president, the Florida senator did not mention the Dream Act by name; however, he did call for “a legal immigration system that allows us to attract and assimilate the world’s best and brightest"—an apparent reference to proposals to award green cards to foreign graduates of American universities.
Mr. Rubio also proposed updating the federal student-aid system to allow more money to flow to online programs and competency-based courses.
“I believe in federal financial aid. I couldn’t have gone to college without it,” he said. “But it’s not just about spending more money on these programs; it’s also about strengthening and modernizing them.”
Mr. Rubio, who owed more than $100,000 in student loans when he graduated from law school in the mid-90s, also called for expanding disclosures around student debt, saying, “We must give students more information on the costs and benefits of the student loans they’re taking out.”
With additional reporting from Eric Kelderman and Allie Bidwell.
