Obama's College Scorecard misses mark on value of education, student debt

Just over two weeks ago, the Obama administration launched a system by which prospective college applicants and their families may view a scorecard for each college and university in the country. These scorecards are intended to make it easy for applicants to make informed judgments about the value of the different options open to them by comparing data about tuition, debt and salary across institutions. While it is crucial for prospective students to be able to see beyond school marketing campaigns and make the right financial decisions, this reductive method of appraisal misunderstands what it should mean to get an education and is not positioned to adequately hold accountable those who work to keep college out of reach for so many.

Tufts' scorecard provides an instructive look at what the Obama administration deems valuable in a college degree. The "Average Annual Cost" and "Salary After Attending" metrics flank the "Graduation Rate" statistic like an input-output function one might have seen in a middle-school math class. As others have argued, higher education is valuable in a way that is not reducible to a monetary cost-benefit analysis.

Additionally, to use post-graduation salary as a metric for a school's quality of education erroneously assumes a causality between the work and learning done on campus and the job prospects open to graduates. Since, according to the scorecard, only 11 percent of Tufts undergraduates come from families with income levels below $40,000 per year, and since recent studies have shown a given family's income to be a frighteningly accurate prediction of its next generation's income, there is very little to suggest that Tufts' curricula are necessarily related to alumni's higher earnings. A school with Tufts' socioeconomic profile, then, might have an advantage on Obama's scorecard simply because its students come from wealthier families. While the "Students Paying Down Their Debt" figure tacitly addresses this misleading measurement, it does not prevent the scorecard from eliding the broader societal constraints on finding a job capable of funding student loan debt.

It's hugely important for private universities to find ways to stay as accessible and affordable as possible. However, the onus should not be on them to breed alumni who are marketable enough to pay off inordinate loan packages. Framing the situation in this way cynically accepts a status quo in which massive tuition, scarce reasonable aid and crippling debt feed each other in an endless cycle. Rather than focusing on how to make a bad arrangement work by pressuring colleges to produce high earners, the federal government should be focusing on how to increase its aid resources and prevent the predatory private lending that, between 2012 and 2013, amounted to a total of $6.2 billion. It's time for the national conversation about the value of college to stop casting institutions of higher education as income generators and to start addressing the need for everyone who wants to pursue a degree to do so without betting their future.