Obama's College Reform Plan

President Obama has just proposed a college reform plan. As is usual with such federal initiatives, it completely misses the point, and if implemented will probably not have the intended consequences.

The president proposes to use federal power to make public some key attributes of colleges and universities, like their graduation rates and proportion of graduates who get jobs.  That part is fine in theory, though exactly how they will figure out if a graduate has an "adequate" job is a question (will flipping hamburgers at a McDonalds for a PhD graduate qualify as "having a job"?).  He also proposes to adjust federal grants on the basis of such numbers.  Apparently -- once again -- he has forgotten how people game such rules.  If grants are apportioned according to graduation rates, colleges will simply increase graduation rates by inflating grades and lowering the already abysmally low bar for passing a course.

The president's plan simply doesn't take into account that it is federal grants and federal intervention that have caused much of this problem in the first place. Because of all the federal infusion of money, colleges have gone on wild building sprees, increased their tuition dramatically, and raised the salaries of their top administrators to ridiculous heights. And what is more, several recent studies show that all the federal tuition help and grants that were supposed to make college available to more low-income students hasn't, in fact, made much of a difference.  For example, when the government increased the amount of tuition help it would provide, colleges just reduced their own contributions proportionally, so the student saw little or no net change.

Once again the politicians propose to spend a lot of taxpayer money doing something that sounds good, but in fact is useless and misses the main problem entirely.