ALJZEERA: The centerpiece of the plan is a new ranking system that the federal government hopes to roll out in 2015, which would score colleges on metrics like tuition, average student debt, graduation rates and the percentage of low-income students who attend. Ultimately, the Obama administration hopes, pending congressional approval, to tie those rankings to the amount of federal financial aid that colleges and universities receive, penalizing schools that do not show favorable outcomes with fewer taxpayer dollars…
The current formula for determining how much federal financial aid an institution receives to distribute to students is tied only to the number of students who enroll, regardless of outcomes. Some states — Ohio, Tennessee and Indiana, for example — have experimented with changing that formula to make it more focused on performance, particularly graduation rates…
“It is time to stop subsidizing schools that are not producing good results,”[President Barack] Obama said… (more)
