Battle Lines Drawn in Fight Over List
Katherine Knott
February 14, 2023
Higher education groups are generally opposed to the Biden administration’s plan to create a list of low-financial-value programs, but some think tanks and for-profit colleges like the idea.
If the Biden administration wants to create a list of “low-financial-value” postsecondary programs, it’s going to have to overcome stiff opposition from the higher education lobby, which decried the plan as a slippery slope, problematic and potentially dangerous.
The American Council on Education, the main lobbying group for higher education, said in a letter signed by nearly 25 organizations that it doesn’t think it is possible for the department “to establish a metric or metrics that will fully capture all of the relevant information—both qualitative and quantitative—that would theoretically be used to determine value.”
“These are difficult comments to offer, because we share the department’s desire to help inform students and to shed light on bad actors,” ACE president Ted Mitchell wrote. “But unless the significant data gaps and fundamental flaws can be resolved, moving forward with such a list as a public tool intended for consumer information is likely to do far more harm than good.”
