NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Even though a federally planned college rating system is supposed to help students and families make more informed decisions, there could still be a need to tie federal aid to the ratings system in order to spur institutional improvement.
That’s what U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Education Jamienne Studley deduced Tuesday during a Q&A that followed an update she gave on the status of the proposed rating system.
“I think you could probably model some scenario of a perfect economic market where families and students made terrifically well-informed choices and totally transformed the university by voting with their feet,” Studley said Tuesday at Vanderbilt University, where she was speaking to a group of higher education reporters attending the annual national seminar of the Education Writers Association.
“And if in that market weak schools fell by the wayside, maybe that would be the end of it,” Studley said.
But because “it’s not a perfect economic market,” Studely said, not enough students and families may use the new rating system to incentivize universities to improve on certain key measures, such as graduation rates.
“We may not want to wait for consumer behavior to do it on the theory that we might get there,” Studley said in response to a question that Diverse raised about the rating system.
A draft of the planned rating system is expected to be released “in a couple of months,” Studley said. After that, she said, stakeholders will have “a reasonable amount of time to look at it.”
