The Obama administration will unveil for the first time its plan for rating public colleges in a report due out today.
The report will group schools into three categories: good, bad, and middling, according to a New York Times report.
The Department of Education states that it is a complex project that is limited by the amount of data available, and the report on Friday will be a “draft framework” that will be subject to change before the first version is released with an actual rating formula.
The first system is scheduled to become public before the start of the next year in eight months — however, even then it will be considered a work in progress by officials that will be improved as new data becomes available.
Presdient Obama in mid-2013 announced the ambitious initiative to assess colleges on how open they are to low-income students, how affordable they are, the academic progress of those who attend, and how successful graduates are in secure jobs and paying off student loans. At stake for the colleges is potentially billions of dollars in federal aid.
College administrators have responded coolly to the attempt to asses them, worrying that the government has not yet found a way to reliably conduct such a report. For example, a college that specialized in computer programming that draws some of the smartest minds in the country will do better on income measures than an open-admissions school that does a good job at what it does, but produces lower-income workers. The department argues it will continue to adjust its ratings to take these things into account.
Ted Mitchell, the under secretary of education, said the department is likely to rate most colleges in the “middling” category, and that the top and bottom would be “relatively small categories.”
One of the ideals is to rate programs in order to compare, say, engineering programs to other engineering programs, but the department lacks a reliable way to do this yet, Mitchell said. It is also seeking to find a way to compare graduates’ incomes.
