Another Federal Ed. Folly

If the prospect of college-wide standardized testing is not enough, brace for more educational bureaucracy.

The U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education has proposed to create a database to keep track of educational data on every college student in the U.S. The commission believes that, in so doing, it will be better able to assess the proficiency of both colleges and students. Furthermore, the commission hopes that by tracking individuals it will be able to learn more about demographic trends among college students. But this proposal of a database is not well-founded. While we endorse another of the commission’s ideas—a ranking system of U.S. colleges—the prospect of a student database raises serious concerns.

There are clear privacy concerns associated with the creation of this education database. Although it is unclear how the government would gather information for the database, we are uncomfortable with opening up more channels through which the government can track its citizens. It is also unclear exactly what kinds of problems this data could address. The commission would be wise to propose specific questions it would like to answer before embarking on a data-mining expedition of millions of private citizens.

Furthermore, incentivizing colleges to contribute to a database will be a difficult task. Individual schools have little to gain from the database and therefore have almost no reason to open their records to the government. Given the likely difficulty of collecting data, the database could very well turn into an expensive, useless bureaucracy. Funds toward creating and maintaining such a database would be better spent on other educational initiatives such as grants and loans.

The commission’s proposal to create a more comprehensive system of college rankings, however, is a worthy one. Currently, the major college rankings—U.S. News and World Reports and the Princeton Review—only rank the top few hundred schools. The creation of more a comprehensive ranking system would serve students across the spectrum of academic ability. In particular, students who are not applying to top-tier schools would be given tools to be better gauge which colleges will serve them best.

In an ideal ranking system, users will be able to adjust the weights various factors, such as school size, average SAT scores, and cost, to find schools that fit them best. We envision an online ranking system that allows tinker with their weighting schemes. (Of course, it is important to exercise caution in weighing rankings, since a college’s worth is based on a wide range of factors.) Evaluations of peer institutions, however, should not be included in the rankings, since they are notoriously difficult to measure.

While a broader rankings system has a clear audience and purpose—informing consumers in an important niche where private enterprise has failed—a nationwide database of students has no defined purpose and carries a bevy of risks. The Department of Education should implement a ranking of all U.S. colleges, but it should table its proposal for a database of students.