“We Must Do Something. This Is Something. Ergo…”

I’m quite puzzled by Rebecca Schuman’s piece defending the Obama administration’s proposed universal rating system for higher ed.     I certainly agree that the problems the ratings purportedly address are real.   As Paul has argued at substantial length, the current system — under which the students and taxpayers will cover ever-more-astronomical tuition fees with virtually no accountability — is a disaster that combines the worst features of free markets and government monopolies.  The problem, however, is that the administration’s proposals are mostly irrelevant or counterproductive to the problems of accessibility, rent-seeking and cost-shifting that are endemic to the current system.  Giving universities higher ratings based on the earnings of graduates doesn’t provide incentives to lower tuition; it provides strong incentives to avoid students from poor backgrounds and from offering majors that lead to less lucrative careers.  Basing ratings on retention rates doesn’t provide incentives to lower tuition costs or cut administrative bloat; it provides strong incentives not to fail anybody who can pay the tuition and avoid committing a felony during their tenure.   Accountability is necessary, but doing it through formal ratings systems is a very dangerous game.  As the USNews ratings have taught us, it’s enormously difficult to design ratings systems that aren’t easy to game in ways that subvert their intended goals.  The Obama administration’s system seems particularly poorly designed.

I would go into more detail about why the proposed ratings system is a bad one, except that Schuman has done most of the work for me.   For example:

I’ll start with the aspect of the plan that causes the most agita in academia: The emphasis on graduate earnings. Critics of the program are right to point out that a school that churns out hedge fund managers (or, you know, the legacy rich, who were always going to “earn”) does not deserve a better rating than a school with a stellar program in, say, social work, one of the worst-paid but most important jobs in the known universe. But the fix for this is easy: Tie aid not to salaries, but to relative earnings specific to both field and region.

First of all, Schuman’s “easy” fix is inadequate; it addresses the “maximize business majors and kill your social work program” issue, but not the “punish schools that serve relatively more students from disadvantaged backgrounds” problem.    But more to the point, the whole form of argument will be familiar to anyone who has read “liberal hawks” distance themselves from the Iraq War.  (“When I favored the Iraq War, I favored an imaginary war fought by competent people that came out well, not the one offered by the Bush administration.”)    If the administration offers a better universal rating plan, we can consider it.  What’s relevant for the time being is the one actually being offered, which is terrible.

Even more remarkably, Schuman doesn’t actually defend any of the details of the rating system.  Rather, her defense of the proposals rests on the premises that 1)if university presidents (including Ken Starr) don’t like something it has to be good, and 2)even a really bad rating system will force “accountability” for reasons that are as opaque as the causal mechanism that would cause a stable liberal democracy to spontaneously replace a deposed Saddam Hussein.  I assume it doesn’t require elaborate argument to show that these are unserious arguments.    That problems are real doesn’t make any proposed solution effective, and basing one’s policy views based on people you don’t like opposing them is a poor way of proceeding.  (If university presidents oppose cuts to state aid, does that mean we have to support them?) The universal rating system is worth doing only if it’s likely to work, and is Schuman implicitly concedes in its current form it almost certainly won’t.

The bigger issue here is that the better solution to the current crisis in higher ed would be to replace indirect subsidy with direct subsidy — state schools that offer an affordable tuition, a broader system of Pell Grants that offers more aid to the non-affluent, but structured in a way that creates downward pressure on tuition.  But with these solutions off the table, we’re struck with alternatives that are unlikely to accomplish much, a central problem of the current American political condition.