Create a free Diverse: Issues In Higher Education account to continue reading

ED Scraps Plans for College Ratings System

Association of Public and Land-grant Universities President Peter McPhersonAssociation of Public and Land-grant Universities President Peter McPherson

The Department of Education announced Thursday that it is shelving plans to move forward on a controversial college rating system and instead will offer a tool providing data that allows the user to compare schools to each other.

The Obama administration had announced plans in the summer of 2013 to develop a standardized ratings system that would allow it to hold colleges and universities accountable for their students’ success and to tie the institutions’ federal aid to those results. However, critics — historically Black colleges and universities among them — said that the system could not be fairly applied across the board because some institutions were at a disadvantage from the beginning as a result of starting with underprepared students and being underresourced.

Last December, the White House unveiled a model for its program that would label schools as high-, middle- or low-performing based on 11 metrics but stressed that it remained a work in progress. The new analytical tool still is scheduled to be available before the start of the 2015-16 academic year as was the original program.

“We have found that the needs of students are very diverse and the criteria they use to choose a college vary widely,” Deputy Under Secretary of Education Jamienne S. Studley wrote in the blog post that announced the shift. “By providing a wealth of data ― including many important metrics that have not been published before ― students and families can make informed comparisons and choices based on the criteria most important to them.”

Association of Public and Land-grant Universities President Peter McPherson welcomed the change in approach.

Ensuring that prospective students and their families have key information on every post-secondary institution is critical to enabling them to select a college or university that best fit their goals and circumstances based on their own priorities,” he said in a statement Thursday. “This is a much better approach than having the federal government make those judgments for them.”

The trusted source for all job seekers
We have an extensive variety of listings for both academic and non-academic positions at postsecondary institutions.
Read More
The trusted source for all job seekers