President Obama has turned his attention to increasing the number of Americans with college degrees. With college costs and student debt on the rise, the choices that American families make when searching for and selecting a college have never been more important. Yet, students struggle to find clear, reliable data on critical questions.
Critical Questions on College Affordability and Value
America needs colleges to focus on affordability and supporting all students who enroll. Many existing college rankings reward schools for spending more money and rejecting more students. College leaders and state policymakers who seek to improve institutions' performance often lack reliable ways to determine how well their schools are serving the students.
That is why on September 12, 2015 President Obama announced new steps from the Department of Education to help students, parents, and their advisers make better college choices.
These new steps include:
Organizations using the new tools:
The new College Scorecard has:
Publishing new, more useful data in the new College Scorecard, including:
Supporting higher education leaders, policymakers, researchers, and developers who are improving measures of college performance and helping colleges set benchmarks and improve performance, through efforts that:
The White House Council of Economic Advisers’ research on various methodological approaches to measuring college performance, published in a report entitled “Using Federal Data to Measure & Improve Performance,” can advance efforts to strengthen college opportunity and outcomes for students from all backgrounds.
Moreover, while no single metric captures all of the purposes, missions, and outcomes of a diverse array of American colleges, universities, community colleges, and career colleges, the Department of Education offers three examples of methodologies to highlight high-performing colleges in its report entitled “Better Information for Better College Choices and College Performance.”
These methodologies and high-performing schools are:
Strengthening partnerships with the higher education community by providing the best information and tools on college quality through:
New capabilities created with the open API, customized to serve a variety of students and counselors including:
Building on the Administration’s efforts hold higher education institutions to high standards for serving students well, including ongoing efforts to:
By making federal data on the performance of U.S. institutions widely available to the public, to policymakers, to researchers, and to the institutions themselves, the Administration hopes the increased transparency will further simulate robust innovation and discovery across the country, with the goal of supporting students as they pursue their academic and career goals through their college education.
For more information click here.
Critical Questions on College Affordability and Value
- Whether or not you are likely to graduate
- Whether you can find middle-class jobs that fit with your degree
- Whether or not you can find the job that suits you and will help you pay off your loans
America needs colleges to focus on affordability and supporting all students who enroll. Many existing college rankings reward schools for spending more money and rejecting more students. College leaders and state policymakers who seek to improve institutions' performance often lack reliable ways to determine how well their schools are serving the students.
That is why on September 12, 2015 President Obama announced new steps from the Department of Education to help students, parents, and their advisers make better college choices.
These new steps include:
- A new College Scorecard - CollegeScorecard.ed.gov
- New, comprehensive and updated data on higher education institutions.
- Customized tools for students, will 11 organizations already using these data to launch new tools.
Organizations using the new tools:
- ScholarMatch, StartClass and College Abacus, three college search resources are using this data to help students search for, compare, and develop a list of colleges based on the outcomes data that the Department is making available to the Public for the first time.
- PayScale, which offers consumers a large salary database, will use the new data to analyze various colleges' return-on-investment for different student groups.
- InsideTrack, which is a team of coaches and consultants working to improve students outcomes, will use the data to develop implement effective student-centered initiatives.
- ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism newsroom, has built a tool with the open data to help consumers make more informed decisions.
The new College Scorecard has:
- User-centered design
- Open Data
- Agile Development
Publishing new, more useful data in the new College Scorecard, including:
- Employment Outcomes
- Student-level Outcomes Data
Supporting higher education leaders, policymakers, researchers, and developers who are improving measures of college performance and helping colleges set benchmarks and improve performance, through efforts that:
- Expedite new tools, research and policy analysis
- Share research and methodologies for measuring college performance
The White House Council of Economic Advisers’ research on various methodological approaches to measuring college performance, published in a report entitled “Using Federal Data to Measure & Improve Performance,” can advance efforts to strengthen college opportunity and outcomes for students from all backgrounds.
Moreover, while no single metric captures all of the purposes, missions, and outcomes of a diverse array of American colleges, universities, community colleges, and career colleges, the Department of Education offers three examples of methodologies to highlight high-performing colleges in its report entitled “Better Information for Better College Choices and College Performance.”
These methodologies and high-performing schools are:
- Colleges that serve as "engines of opportunity"
- Colleges with "excellence in outcomes"
- Colleges that offer "financial value"
Strengthening partnerships with the higher education community by providing the best information and tools on college quality through:
- Continued consumer testing with students and counselors to optimize the College Scorecard’s features and capabilities to support students’ college choice process.
- Annual releases of each new cohort, including new data on part-time, transfer, and Pell recipient graduation rates and program-level earnings data for the 2012 cohorts.
- Technical Review Panels to explore how to strengthen data collection and use data in ways that can inform college choice and institutional performance models.
- New capabilities created with the open API, customized to serve a variety of students and counselors.
New capabilities created with the open API, customized to serve a variety of students and counselors including:
- Better college search and choice tools
- New outcomes and metrics
- Better advising and support for students
- More comprehensive rankings with new outcomes data
Building on the Administration’s efforts hold higher education institutions to high standards for serving students well, including ongoing efforts to:
- Fight congressional rollbacks on the "Gainful Employment" Rules that require poor-performing programs at career colleges to either improve performance or else lose eligibility for federal financial aid
- Finalize proposed rules that require states to identify low-performing teach education programs
- Propose legislation that would pay colleges for results, not just enrollment, by reforming the "campus-based" student aid programs to invest over 6 billion in grants, loans, and work-study at colleges that enroll low-income students, graduate them, and allow them to repay their loans successfully.
By making federal data on the performance of U.S. institutions widely available to the public, to policymakers, to researchers, and to the institutions themselves, the Administration hopes the increased transparency will further simulate robust innovation and discovery across the country, with the goal of supporting students as they pursue their academic and career goals through their college education.
For more information click here.