The Obama administration will soon publish its plan to rate more than 6,000 colleges nationwide based on the value they provide to students and to society.

The goal is to steer billions in federal financial aid toward the colleges that rate highly — and to yank funds from those that fail to meet administration standards on yardsticks such as the graduation rate, the cost of tuition or the percentage of low-income students on campus.


Congressional Republicans, outraged, are already going on the attack.

“They’re getting involved in something they have no business getting involved with,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), a former college administrator. “Absolutely, it’s overreach.”

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) plans to lead an effort to cut off funding for the ratings initiative. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) has said he’ll do the same in the Senate. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is among many prominent voices denouncing the concept as profoundly flawed.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said he sees rating colleges as “a financial and moral obligation,” meant to help families make wise choices and to ensure taxpayers’ $150 billion annual investment in student aid isn’t squandered.

But GOP critics frame the rating plan — expected Friday — as yet another example of arrogance and imperialism from the White House. They argue that it’s not just presumptuous, but logistically impossible for the Education Department to assess the quality of so many institutions, ranging from Harvard to Honolulu Community College.

And they have some powerful allies in their corner, including several higher education trade associations and numerous college presidents, some of whom have been quietly lobbying their representatives for months — not that it took a lot of lobbying to rouse opposition to the ratings. Republicans on the Hill were already up in arms over the administration’s proposed crackdown on for-profit career-training colleges, calling it an unwarranted intrusion into the free market.

“To a lot of Republicans, this Department of Education has been characterized by mission creep, and [the rating plan] is simply another manifestation of that,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president of government and public affairs at the American Council on Education.

The higher ed lobby argues that the ratings could do more harm than good, by purporting to capture the value of a huge and complex institution like a university with a single grade.

“It will be interpreted as a stamp of quality,” said Sarah Flanagan, vice president for government relations and policy at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which has expressed major concerns about the ratings.

NAICU members can’t even imagine how a rating system would work on a practical level, she said — how MIT would be compared with Ohio State and Catawba Valley Community College. “When college presidents think about the math,” she said, “it’s the biggest head-scratcher.”

The pushback has slowed, but not deterred, the administration.

‘Very, very long overdue’

President Barack Obama first put colleges “ on notice” in his 2012 State of the Union, promising to hold them accountable for keeping tuition down. Obama picked up the theme again in the summer of 2013, when he vowed to “shake up the current system” and “stop subsidizing schools that are not producing good results.”

The Education Department, which is in charge of working out the mechanics, has moved cautiously after a flurry of criticism from the higher education community. The plan expected in the coming days won’t score every college in the nation. It’s a draft, meant to spark discussions on what type of data should be used to come up with the ratings and how each data point should be weighted.

The metrics almost certainly will include net price, graduation rate, loan default rate and the percentage of low-income students on campus. The ratings may also take into account how well graduates fare in the job market — including how much they earn.

The administration plans to publish official ratings before the start of the next academic year.

The federal government spends about $150 billion a year on student financial aid for about 13 million students attending more than 6,100 institutions. But many of those students drop out before graduating; others make it through only to find their degree doesn’t help them land a good job. The think tank New America estimates that one in five new borrowers will default on their loans at some point.

To protect the taxpayer investment — and to protect students from making poor choices — Duncan argues that the Education Department has a duty to assess and publish the performance of every college receiving federal aid.

Unlike the popular “Best Colleges” list published by U.S. News & World Report, which ranks institutions primarily by their selectivity and wealth, the federal ratings will focus on accessibility, affordability and student outcomes.

“I absolutely reject the idea that it’s impossible to create a meaningful college rating system for students and families,” Duncan said in a speech last fall. “I reject the idea that the value of a college education is so elusive that no rating system can ever meaningfully help consumers determine its value.”

He has some support from consumer advocates and a few outspoken college administrators.

“The bottom line is that the federal government wants parents and students to know the good places from the bad ones. That’s as simple as I can state it,” said F. King Alexander, the chancellor and president of Louisiana State University. “I’d say this is very, very long overdue.”

Congressional Republicans generally agree that the administration can, and should, prod colleges to make public more information about student costs and outcomes. A bipartisan bill pending in the Senate would require more transparency from colleges about average cost, average student debt, enrollment in remedial classes and graduates’ salaries.

Triscuits v. Wheat Thins

But posting such data, Republicans say, is very different from judging one institution better than another. The Food and Drug Administration requires nutrition labels but doesn’t rate Triscuits as superior to Wheat Thins. The Energy Department mandates fuel economy stickers but doesn’t pronounce the Honda Civic a better value than the Ford Focus.

So what, they ask, makes the Education Department think it should be in the ratings business?

“Students and their families know best what will meet their educational needs,” Goodlatte said.

He pointed out that some students put a premium on factors that will never be considered in federal ratings, such as a college’s religious affiliation, sports programs or reputation in a particular field of study. “It is not the place of the federal government, through a rating system, to attempt to measure the value of an individual’s education,” Goodlatte said.

Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said “the devil will be in the details” of the rating plan and he would reserve judgment until seeing the formula. But in general, he said, “the administration’s continued go-it-alone approach is out of touch and not in the best interests of students.”

The opposition on the Hill all but ensures that the administration won’t be able to proceed with its long-term goal of rewarding top-notch colleges and punishing laggards. The plan was to tweak the financial aid system to achieve those ends, perhaps by making it cheaper for students at highly-rated colleges to get federal loans. But tying federal spending to the ratings would require congressional approval.

“It’s politically very hard to do that,” said Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

Still, even just publishing the ratings could have a major impact. The administration already posts scorecards on thousands of colleges, listing metrics such as average student debt and default rate. An online tool from the National Center for Education Statistics has even more data. But analysts within the higher education community said the websites aren’t widely used and haven’t made much of an impression on high-school students.

A rating sheet giving colleges actual grades would be likely to get far more attention, they said.

That’s what worries Patricia McGuire, the president of Trinity Washington University.

The administration has said repeatedly that it doesn’t want the ratings to penalize colleges for accepting the most challenging students, even though they might have a lower graduation rate as a result. Nor does it want to penalize colleges that send graduates into careers with typically modest pay, such as teaching or counseling.

Yet it is intent on quantifying each institution’s impact and value — and McGuire can’t help but fear that schools like Trinity Washington, which accepts many low-income students from the D.C. area, might come out looking less-than-stellar.

“It’s an effort to boil all of what a university does down to a single score,” McGuire said. “And there’s a lot at stake if the federal government says you’re an ‘A’ institution or a ‘D’ institution.”