Obama’s Backup Plan on Colleges

White House officials are well aware that their plan to link federal financial aid to college performance faces hurdles. College presidents have generally resisted attempts to measure outcomes, and Congressional Republicans have generally resisted any domestic-policy proposal from President Obama.

But the White House has something of a backup plan. Even if Mr. Obama (or his successor, given the plan’s long timeline) cannot persuade Congress to change the rules for awarding federal aid by 2018, his administration can still collect and publish the data on college outcomes.

Mr. Obama’s first choice is that this data - on tuition, graduation and retention rates, student makeup and graduates’ earnings - help determine how much federal money the colleges receive. The backup plan is that parents and students will be able to use the data to decide where to enroll and, in the process, reward top-performing colleges and punish laggards. The White House plans to publish ratings based on this data by 2015.

Whether this backup plan works will depend greatly on the details.

Much of the data the administration plans to use in its ratings is already public. Mr. Obama’s Education Department already publishes a “college scorecard” with a wealth of information. The Education Department also has a search engine called the College Navigator. Private groups, like Washington Monthly, also publish data on graduation rates and other measures. (The magazine’s latest version is scheduled for release next week.)

Looking at these Web sites, you can discover, for example, that the University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of Texas at El Paso seem to have impressively high graduation rates, given the makeup of the student bodies. Baylor University and Montana State University, on the other hand, have lower graduation rates than one would expect, given the students who enroll there.

Yet it is not at all clear that such information has any significant influence on students’ and parents’ decisions about where to enroll. How often have you heard somebody talk about graduation rates when choosing a college?

Several studies have found that low-income students, in particular, end up attending colleges with low graduation rates - and many then fail to graduate. Only about one in three low-income students with the academic records to be admitted to one of the country’s 238 most selective colleges attend one, according to a recent study by Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard.

The New York Times Source: “The Missing ‘One-Offs’: The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low Income Students,” by Caroline M. Hoxby and Christopher Avery; National Bureau of Economic Research.

And students with identical backgrounds are less likely to finish college when they attend one with a lower graduation rate, according to a large study by William G. Bowen, Michael S. McPherson and Matthew M. Chingos.

To be clear, money is not the only reason that students choose to attend colleges with low graduation rates. More selective colleges can often be less expensive for low-income students, because they can offer more financial aid, notes Sarah Turner, a University of Virginia economist.

A larger reason for these often self-defeating decisions is a lack of good information. Many students and parents do not seem to understand the vast variation in college quality.

That is where Mr. Obama’s backup plan comes in. He and his aides want to close this information gap and help people make better decisions, officials say. But they should not underestimate the difficulty of the task.

Theirs is hardly the first plan to publish comparative data about colleges on the Internet. So far, though, the information has failed to break into the mainstream. Figuring out why - and what kind of information might fare better - may be the first task facing Mr. Obama’s education aides.