What’s Consumer Information Doing in Trump’s Executive Order on Free Speech?

For weeks, college leaders have been bracing for President Trump’s executive order requiring colleges to uphold free speech or risk losing federal grants. The suspense is over: The president signed the order on Thursday. The free-speech provisions ended up being vague, their impact uncertain.

But other, unrelated portions of the order, “Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities,” are much more specific. And it’s easier to predict how they could play out, because they build on an Obama-era push to help consumers make informed college choices. Let’s take a look:

What are the order’s consumer-information directives?

The order directs the U.S. Department of Education to add new pieces of data to the College Scorecard, a consumer-facing website introduced by the Obama administration. Notably, the order calls for program-level data, looking at former students’ median earnings, debt levels, and loan repayments. It also expands the scorecard’s reach into graduate programs.

And it instructs the department to offer a website and mobile application informing borrowers of federal student loans of their debt burdens and repayment options.

The government already gives consumers lots of information about colleges. What’s new here?

Not much, really. Experts interviewed on Thursday saw the order’s consumer-information portions as tweaks or formalizations rather than changes. “I don’t want to say this isn’t anything new,” said Amy Laitinen, director of higher education at New America. “But it really isn’t.”

Few policy ideas are less controversial than giving consumers more information. Many steps spelled out in the order were already underway, observers said, and none seemed to require an executive order. The Education Department could have made the changes on its own, in other words, with less fanfare.

What may be most surprising is how the order builds on the efforts of Trump’s immediate predecessor. “The groundwork and infrastructure for this was laid down in the Obama administration,” said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

The most noteworthy piece is the inclusion of program-level data on the College Scorecard, which currently has only institution-level data. But adding that information was always part of the plan under the Obama administration — the data simply were not available during the website’s rollout. And it’s something Trump’s Education Department has discussed doing before, too, as part of efforts to dismantle the previous administration’s “gainful-employment rule.”

The student-loan information that the order seeks to share with borrowers is available now, but it’s spread across a number of different government websites, said Ben Miller, vice president for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress. “This idea of one standard website is an important step,” he said, in improving the repayment experience.

What’s so important about program-level data?

Research shows that variations in earnings are driven more by what people studied than by what college they attended. Looking at a median-earnings figure for a university probably under-predicts what, say, an engineering major would make, and over-predicts what an education major would.

Among program-level data’s strongest champions is Mark S. Schneider, a former vice president of the American Institutes for Research who now directs the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences.

A number of states have already moved in that direction with their own data, said Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University.

While program-level data can be really useful to prospective students pursuing short-term vocational training, its value is less clear to those entering traditional four-year colleges, said Robert Shireman, director of higher-education excellence and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. The reason? “Most students really have no idea what they’ll major in when they start college.”

A student, in other words, could make a rational decision to enroll in a particular college whose business majors fare well, and then study something else entirely.

What difference will it make?

Giving students more information isn’t controversial. But it also might not be very effective. “There is little to no evidence,” Shireman said, “that providing students who are close to making a decision with a pile of data will influence them in a positive direction at all.” There’s just too much information out there, he said, and too little context for making sense of it. Students still need guidance. The information, he added, might be most helpful in the hands of the people who provide that guidance: counselors, teachers, parents, and college-access groups.

Research has examined the impact of the College Scorecard on student behavior. It found, in a nutshell, that the website appeared to influence application behavior only among more-affluent students. And while it’s possible that the scorecard affected some college decisions, it made no statistical difference in where students enrolled, even for that group.

While changing students’ college-shopping behavior is an intuitive way to improve their outcomes, it can only hope to matter to those students who are in fact shopping. And that’s hardly all of them. Sixty percent of first-time students applying for financial aid list only one college on their applications, Draeger noted.

Besides, using the information well can be tricky even for students making decisions at the graduate-school level, Draeger said. Take a student considering a master’s degree in social work. Looking at data points on earnings and loan debt might make that seem like a bad idea, he said. The picture changes considerably if the prospective student knows that he or she could qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

What’s the bigger picture here?

Observers wondered how the executive order squared with some of the administration’s other higher-education efforts. Draeger is all for more consumer information, he said. But it’s hard to accept it as a “silver bullet” solution for improving college affordability from an administration whose recent budget proposal included “drastic cuts” in student aid, he said.

Another important point: While pretty much everyone is in favor of consumer information, there’s a difference between favoring it as a first step and as a final step. “There is a bit of philosophical debate over whether letting consumers vote with their feet is sufficient regulation or not,” Miller said. While Trump’s Education Department has floated consumer information as a replacement for other regulation, the Obama administration’s original proposal wasn’t for a college scorecard at all. It was for a ratings system tying federal dollars to student outcomes.

Perhaps the executive order matters partly as a signal to Congress, which is working to achieve the long-overdue reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, Laitinen said. There is already strong bipartisan support for improving transparency in higher ed, she noted. And legislation, of course, is where bigger changes could be made.

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.