Kick the Bipartisan Addiction to Higher Education Accountability Metrics

Conventionally, Democrats have an aversion to the idea of boiling everything that happens in K-12 education down to a simple metric that can be used to judge the efficacy of a school or its educators. Meanwhile, Republicans tend to resist the idea of any top-down, federal government-controlled metric used to determine nearly any outcome.

These tendencies may help to explain why the debate over higher education accountability is so confusing. Counter to what one might expect, Democrats in the Obama and Biden administrations have proposed regulations that could shut down a college or university if it fails to meet “gainful employment” standards tied to students’ debt and earnings.

The messaging behind these policies is simple and based on a sensible principle: No one should take out more debt than they can afford to pay back based on their future earnings. Republicans and Democrats generally agree here, and there is broad support for making this information widely available so that students can make better choices.

Things become more difficult when these data points are used to shut down schools that fail to meet a particular standard, primarily due to the fact that deciding what this standard should be is trickier than most assume. For instance, Democratic administrations have opted for a more punitive gainful-employment test because the rule generally only applies to for-profit colleges, which they often dislike.

But there are also many assumptions baked into the data that matter less when used for transparency and much more when used for accountability. For example, decisions about how to set n-sizes or whether to combine or separate astronomy and astrophysics programs can have significant impacts on the way metrics look. In addition, a bad economy might mean universally lower earnings and a rising tide of borrowing (especially for living expenses) that can drown a large number of otherwise decent schools or programs.

Republicans tend to oppose this approach, but not all for the same reasons. Many express distaste for what may seem like Democrats’ targeting of a political foe by way of turning two words from the Higher Education Act into hundreds of pages of regulations. However, some Republicans seem open, if not outright enthusiastic, about the idea of a similar approach applied to all institutions.

It’s time for both parties to acknowledge the flaws of these approaches. No Child Left Behind failed in part because it attempted to definitively judge schools, all of which teach and test students on basic math and reading skills. In higher education, there seems to be insufficient concern about trying to measure cosmetology, chemistry, and communications with a single instrument.

On top of this, elected officials in both parties seem to lack sufficient understanding about the ways a Department of Education controlled by their ideological opponents could potentially make decisions they might not like. Even if Congress were to spell out accountability formulas and their use in explicit detail (which has not been their practice), there will always be an additional step or two needed for the Department to implement that regime, meaning the fate of any policy will ultimately lie at the whims of whichever party controls the Department.

Leaders on both sides of the aisle are rightly concerned about the relationship between debt and earnings in higher education, and the challenges above should not be taken as an excuse for inaction. Instead, they should embrace a solution that is more egalitarian with less room for political officials in the executive branch to meddle.

First, Congress should give colleges and universities the ability to limit borrowing to a reasonable level, especially when it comes to living expenses. Second, make those institutions responsible for the real-world outcomes of their actual students. Rather than a magic formula designed to approximate whether students should be able to repay their loans, institutions should be required to have “skin in the game” by cosigning their students’ loans. If students repay, no problem. If students fail to repay, the taxpayer is held partially or fully blameless and the institution is forced to adjust to avoid similar outcomes on future loans.

One criticism of this proposal is that, like many other accountability regimes, it would reward institutions that enroll more students from wealthier backgrounds who study in fields likely to place them into high-earning occupations. However, the best way to correct for this already exists in the form of Pell Grants. While reasonable people may disagree about the sufficiency of Pell at its current levels, a plan like this could increase Pell funding, while dispensing with much of the vast, clumsy, and ineffective apparatus designed to protect students and taxpayers.

Disposing of excessive regulations is something Republicans want, and Higher Pell is something Democrats want. So can we agree to drop our addiction to complex federal accountability metrics and make a deal?