William E. Kirwan, the chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said Mr. Obama’s desire to hold down costs and improve graduation rates is a “noble effort.” But he questioned the wisdom of trying to create a rating system. “It’s hard for me to imagine how that can work,” said Dr. Kirwan, who is known as Brit.

But officials said Mr. Obama was determined to shake up a system that he has said costs too much and often provides too little value.

“We have a financial and moral obligation to be good stewards of these dollars,” Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, said in an interview. He said schools often did a poor job of providing information to prospective students and their parents, making the choice of a college complicated. “To defend the status quo, for me, you can’t do that.”

The cost of attending public and private colleges continues to significantly outpace earnings growth in the United States. Tuition, room and board at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., one of the most expensive schools in the nation, will approach $65,000 in the next academic year. Costs will be about $60,000 at Stanford and more than $50,000 for out-of-state students at the University of Michigan.

White House officials said the government rating system would provide new incentives for colleges to hold down costs and broaden access to a more diverse student population — and provide an alternative to the private rankings, where colleges often battle for spots by erecting lavish new athletic centers and libraries and by becoming more selective in whom they admit. The officials said Mr. Obama’s system would not rank schools numerically but would give them grades or ratings like “excellent,” “good,” “fair” or “poor.”

“He is not interested in driving anybody out of business, unless they are poorly serving the American people,” said Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. “In which case, I think he’s probably pretty comfortable with that.”

In interviews, several college presidents expressed deep reservations about the idea.

“As with many things, the desire to solve a complicated problem in what feels like a simple way can capture people’s imagination,” said Adam F. Falk, the president of Williams College in Massachusetts. Dr. Falk said the danger of a rating system is that information about the colleges is likely to be “oversimplified to the point that it actually misleads.”