Did you like No Child Left Behind?

Then you'll love the post-secondary version!

Quote:

President Obama announced a set of ambitious proposals on Thursday aimed at making colleges more accountable and affordable by rating them and ultimately linking those ratings to financial aid. Related A draft of the proposal, obtained by The New York Times and likely to cause some consternation among colleges, shows a plan to rate colleges before the 2015 school year based on measures like tuition, graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and the percentage of lower-income students who attend. The ratings would compare colleges against their peer institutions. If the plan can win Congressional approval, the idea is to base federal financial aid to students attending the colleges partly on those rankings.

Linky.



Tennessee has been trying something similar:

Quote:

After a series of meetings with the colleges, outside experts, and lawmakers, the state’s Higher Education Commission narrowed the evaluations down to about a half-dozen key factors that are tailored to the goals of each college. Community colleges have different criteria than four-year institutions, and research institutions get points for the amount of research grants they’ve been awarded. To encourage schools to work with needy and nontraditional students, the system awards school a 40 percent bonus for the outcomes of adult or lower-income students who receive Pell Grants. The early efforts by Tennessee and other states that used performance metrics to mete out bonuses didn’t prove to make major changes to student outcomes, such as reducing dropout rates, according to a 2011 study (pdf) from Columbia University’s Teachers College. The researchers noted that there’s not yet enough data to evaluate the new, bigger efforts by Tennessee and a handful of others to make performance the dominant source of funding. Regardless, as the trailblazer, Tennessee’s model is bound to be influential. As the New England Board of Higher Education wrote (pdf) in 2011, “The Tennessee approach is a game-changer, and its success or failure should be evident in short order.”

Linky.



Having looked at college stats, I am kind of dubious about how the ranking will actually... work.

via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=264542&goto=newpost