On Thursday, Jan. 16, 2014, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama met with more than 140 education officials from public and private colleges and universities, corporations, foundations and nonprofit groups to talk about college opportunity.
Organized by White House economic adviser Gene B. Sperling, the event drew pledges from the group for new and additional initiatives that reinforced President Obama’s agenda to use college access as a way to improve economic mobility for Americans. Mr. Obama noted that this would be a “year of action,” asserting, “I’m going to be working with Congress where I can to accomplish this, but I’m also going to act on my own if Congress is deadlocked.”
The higher education community reacted positively but not without some criticism of the forum. Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity College (Washington, D.C.), suggested in The Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, that “the gathering had a big missing link: the experience of the hundreds of colleges that have already provided more access, for far longer, with larger investments than most of the ‘new’ commitments made at the White House meeting.”
The Thursday meeting contrasted with a contentious 2013 when the White House announced that it would issue the Interactive College Scorecard to give students and families five key pieces of data about a college: costs, graduation rate, loan default rate, average amount borrowed, and employment. The Obama administration took an additional step last summer linking the scorecard to student financial aid. Writing in Diverse Issues in Higher Education last month, the president of Metropolitan College (New York), Vinton Thompson, concluded that “President Obama’s proposal of August 2013 to tie individual students’ financial aid to government ratings of the college they attend is perhaps the worst idea ever put forward for higher education by a sitting president.”
Other critics noted that a “one glove fits all” ratings system could not address the difference in mission, purpose, student demographics, resource base, transfer population, or steady improvement across institutions. Still others faulted the quality of the research and the failure to have access measured by agreed-to standards for research not readily available or even developed yet.
Set against this backdrop, there is a critical question that must be answered. Which way forward?
Here are some thoughts.
