WSJ: New Wealth of Details Will Help Families Compare Coll..

New Wealth of Details Will Help Families Compare Colleges

Bill Would Require Disclosure Of Performance, Tuition Data; The Crime Rate
on Campus
By JUNE KRONHOLZ
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 30, 2004; Page D1

Students and their parents who already feel overwhelmed by the amount of
information available on choosing a college will soon have even more data to
pore through.

A new higher-education law is probably a year away from passage, but
whatever form it finally takes, it will require universities to disclose to
the government -- and therefore to consumers -- a good deal more information
than they already do. The required information could include hundreds of new
details about everything from price increases to job-placement rates for
graduates.

Part of the idea behind this legislation, now being debated in Congress, is
to create more competition among the nation's colleges and universities by
providing their customers with more information. But it's also an effort by
Congress to hold down rising tuition by shining a spotlight on how colleges
operate.

Tuition rose 14% at public colleges and universities last year. The new law
is expected to require colleges to justify tuition increases that are more
than double the rate of inflation and to submit to a government audit after
two years of big increases.

While some of the new information could be useful to parents and their
college-bound kids, a lot of it is arcane. Schools would, for example, be
required to tell prospective students how they can file complaints with the
college's accrediting agency. Colleges would also have to state their
"learning objectives."

There is already a vast amount of information available about individual
schools: it's squirreled away on perhaps a dozen Web sites, none of them
linked to one another and many largely unknown. Some of the sites are run by
the federal government, while others are operated by states or commercial
outfits. The question is where to look, what to look for and what the
information means. If a site says that a school has a 75% six-year
graduation rate, for example, is that good or bad?

The government's College Opportunities On-Line, or "Cool" site
(www.nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cool), was launched after the last review of the
higher-education law in 1998. The site lists data about student
demographics, graduation rates and tuition costs. It also includes campus
crime statistics, each college's leading competitors, and details about
admissions (such as how many students scored 700 or above on the 800-point
SAT verbal exam and the number of applicants by gender).

The government student-aid Web site
(studentaid2.ed.gov/gotocollege/campustour) has a litany of aid-related
stats for hundreds of colleges. At Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, for
instance, 93% of new freshman sought aid, 88% got merit-based aid, and 54%
held federal work-study jobs.

The College Board's Web site (www.collegeboard.com) is hugely popular and
easy to use for college searches. The National Collegiate Athletic
Association (www.ncaa.org) lists enrollment and graduation information on
athletes. The National Association of Independent College and Universities
provides links to its members' self-assessment studies
(www.naicu.edu/Accountability/student/assesslinks.htm) -- Oberlin College,
for example, posts its latest parent- and alumni-satisfaction surveys.

Some sites help with comparison shopping. Tell the government's Cool site
that you want an engineering program at a college with 1,500 students or
fewer, no more than 1,000 miles from Washington, D.C., and it will spit out
the names of 21 schools. Put a similar query to the Association of Jesuit
Colleges (www.ajcunet.edu), and it will propose five of its members. But
after that, any further comparison -- on faculty qualifications, programs,
student-faculty ratios -- is largely up to you.

The 'Affordability Index'

States also are expanding their college reporting requirements, increasingly
offering data online that the federal government and commercial
college-search sites don't. Florida's Board of Regents compares graduation
rates among the state's public universities, and reports how many graduates
from each school are earning more than $22,000 five years after receiving
their degrees.

This year, the debate over the Higher Education Act has focused on the cost
of college. In a House bill that is likely to form the core of the new law,
schools whose students receive federal grants or loans -- and that covers
almost every college and university -- would be required to score themselves
on a College Affordability Index.

The bill, favored by Republicans, also would require colleges to disclose
how much they spend on teaching per student and how many of their students
transfer to other colleges each year, among other things.

Colleges and their Washington lobbyists are already grumbling that some of
the new data will be impossible to get, won't mean much, and will only add
to their rising costs. Arizona State University says it provides data to 14
college guidebooks, and even then turns away some requests.

If the Higher Education Act passes with these new requirements, it's still
unclear when exactly this data would be available for students and parents
to peruse.

James Sumner, Grinnell's admissions dean, urges prospective students to find
out how many students receive aid from their colleges because "that suggests
the institution's commitment to its students." He also advises looking at
SAT and ACT scores to see if a college is a good academic fit, and at
campus-crime statistics. The Cool site breaks down each school's programs by
the number of degrees they award.

But other common indicators are less useful, Mr. Sumner adds. Graduation
rates are highest at schools that attract the brightest students, he says,
and the number of faculty with Ph.D.'s isn't very meaningful now that
graduate degrees are fairly common.

Confusing Data

The data aren't always easy to understand. The government requires colleges
to list the percentage of students who graduate within four years. Those
schools with the highest graduation rates are the best, right? Think again:
More students are working to pay their way through school, and needing more
time to finish. And, to cut costs, universities are offering fewer sections
of required courses, delaying graduations even further. The government now
also asks for six-year graduation rates to reflect those trends, but even
that is becoming outdated as the number of part-time students keeps
increasing.

Copyright 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Abe Kohen wrote:
> New Wealth of Details Will Help Families Compare Colleges
>
> Bill Would Require Disclosure Of Performance, Tuition Data; The Crime
> Rate on Campus
> By JUNE KRONHOLZ
> Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
> June 30, 2004; Page D1
>

<article snipped>

Or, how to force colleges and universities to spend even more time and money
collecting meaningless data.

The holes in the assumptions this proposed legislation appears to make are
so many and so obvious. Just one example: percentage of grads making $22K
five years out. Well, so much for schools where a large percentage of grads
go on to graduate school! What a crock.

--
Janet

Dear Artemesia! Poetry's a Snare:/Bedlam has many Mansions:have a
care:/ Your Muse diverts you, makes the Reader sad:/ You think your
self inspir'd; He thinks you mad.


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