Kick the bipartisan addiction to higher education accountability metrics
Michael Brickman
August 3, 2023
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.
