Lessons From the Education Department’s Ratings Reversal
Now that the U.S. Department of Education has decided to ditch the ratings part of its college-ratings system in favor of a customizable, consumer-focused website, plenty of big questions remain. What’s the legacy of the nearly two-year effort? What lessons were learned? What opportunities were lost? We asked several ratings watchers for their views on the department’s change of course. Here’s some of what we heard. It may have "poisoned" future efforts for college accountability. When the ratings were first proposed, they were conceived as a comprehensive system to evaluate colleges of all stripes on a host of measures of interest to both students and policy makers, making the ratings both a consumer and an accountability tool.