Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently reduced the scope of his threat to withhold funding from sanctuary cities, narrowing the focus to a set of grants made by the Justice and Homeland Security departments. This is the latest development in an ongoing dispute that dates back to President Donald Trump’s fifth day in office.

Sessions issued the new guidance in a memo to the grant-making components of the Department of Justice. He outlined what will constitute a sanctuary city for funding purposes and explained which grants these cities could risk losing. This stems from an executive order signed by Donald Trump on January 25 titled, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” which is currently tied up in a legal challenge. The original order threatened to withhold all federal funding, while this most recent memo indicates that it might only affect a relatively small number of grants.

In April, a federal judge blocked a central part of the executive order, prompting President Trump to criticize the ruling and vow to take the issue to the Supreme Court. Judge William Orrick, a district court judge in San Francisco, issued an order in favor of Santa Clara County and the City of San Francisco, both of which challenged the order, arguing that withholding all funding from sanctuary cities was clearly unconstitutional.

The new memo may be a response to this ruling, which referenced past opinions to show that the executive branch does not have unilateral authority to revoke funds or use them to coerce state and local governments. While courts have upheld efforts to attach strings to grant funding, those conditions typically need to be related to the purpose of the grant, and it is usually Congress, not the executive branch, that sets these conditions. For example, courts have said that Congress can condition a portion of highway funding on local drinking age laws because the two are related.

There is no agreed-upon definition for what a sanctuary city is, but the general idea behind the term applies to local governments that limit cooperation with federal immigration officials. When it comes to grant funding, the government has chosen a fairly narrow definition. In fact, Attorney General Sessions’ memo specifically says that willful non-compliance with one specific statute is what will be used to determine sanctuary status.

That statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1373, specifically deals with communication between local governments and federal immigration authorities. It prohibits local governments from blocking or limiting the ability of local officials or agencies from communicating with immigration agents. In April, Sessions notified nine local governments that their laws potentially violate the statute and threatened to withhold Justice Assistance Grant funding if they don’t provide proof of compliance by the end of June.

In the most recent memo, Sessions narrowed his interpretation of the executive order to “be applied solely to federal grants administered by the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security, and not to other sources of federal funding.” He also notes that this condition will only apply to grants from the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Community Policing Services, departments where compliance with Section 1373 is a condition.

In his ruling, Judge Orrick notes that both Santa Clara County and the city of San Francisco get a large portion of their overall funding from the federal government, most of which is unrelated to immigration enforcement. Santa Clara receives $1.7 billion, or about 35 percent of its annual revenue, from the federal government while San Francisco gets $1.2 billion, or about 12.5 percent. That funding comes from a wide range of programs, including entitlement programs, and is used to pay for a number of critical government services. Judge Orrick also concludes that Santa Clara and San Francisco are likely to win the case given the limitations on the executive branch’s control over funding.

While the part of President Trump’s order that seeks to withhold all funding from sanctuary cities is likely unconstitutional, it’s unclear whether a narrower effort–like the one outlined in Sessions’ recent memo–would be successful. As the process continues, we can expect to see additional legal challenges as cities and states fight to maintain both their existing policies and funding.

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

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The Republican presidential candidate that many had previously hailed as the most moderate GOP contender signed a bill Sunday to prohibit the Ohio state health department from contracting with entities that perform or promote abortions.

John Kasich, the Governor of Ohio and presidential hopeful, fulfilled his promise to defund Planned Parenthood, even though the healthcare provider is not specifically named in the bill. However slashing funds is one way that lawmakers plan to get rid of the healthcare provider, which just happens to refer patients to and provide abortion services.

The law will prevent roughly $1.3 million in funding from the Ohio State Health Department from going to STD/HIV testing, general health screenings, and prevention of violence against women. 

@CNN @JohnKasich pic.twitter.com/1xZb2a42uX

— Venisha (@Venishhhha) February 22, 2016

It should be noted that state and federal laws already prohibit taxpayer funds from going towards abortion services, except in the cases of rape, incest, and “therapeutic” abortions (medical diagnosis to save the mother via abortion).

@CNN @JohnKasich How about letting the women in this country dictate things?

— Bomber Doobie (@Bomber_Doobie) February 22, 2016

Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards responded to the news, not surprisingly, unhappy and disappointed.

“It’s clear Kasich has no regard for women’s health or lives, and will stop at nothing to block health care for the tens of thousands of Ohioans who rely on Planned Parenthood,” Richards said in a statement. She added that it would have “devastating consequences for women across Ohio.”

While many see Kasich as the great moderate of the election season, his voting record when it comes to abortion says otherwise. As the Huffington Post has reported:

Just months after becoming governor, Kasich signed a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy unless the fetus is nonviable. In 2013, Kasich signed a budget that stripped roughly $1.4 million in family planning funds from Planned Parenthood, required abortion providers to perform ultrasounds on patients seeking abortions and allowed rape crisis centers to be stripped of their public funds if they referred victims to abortion providers, among other measures. The budget also blocked public hospitals from entering into transfer agreements for medical emergencies with abortion clinics, threatening clinics with closure if they couldn’t get a private hospital to enter into those agreements. Because private hospitals often have religious affiliations, this arrangement often wasn’t possible.

In all, nearly half of Ohio’s abortion clinics have closed since Kasich took office.

Kasich’s gubernatorial office spokesman Joe Andrews responded in a statement with:

The Ohio Department of Health has at least 150 other sub-grantees and contractors for the affected grants and projects addressing such issues as new born babies, infant mortality, expectant mothers, violence against women, and minority HIV/AIDS,” the statement said. “ODH will reallocate funding from ineligible providers under the new law to other currently eligible providers, ranging from local health departments and community organizations to hospitals and universities. These organizations will be required to submit proposals in order to receive funding.

The issues that arise from Kasich’s signing of the bill go past clinics not having proper funding. This goes as far as to cause issues with insurers and hospitals. As Cleveland.com reports, “…the Columbus Public Health department said it would be unable to contract with any Columbus hospital because they either provide abortion services, contract with abortion clinics, or refer patients to abortion services.”

In addition, Texas is a great example of what can happen when you remove a major women’s health service from Medicaid plans. Recently, women in Texas stopped using the most effective forms of contraceptives, and the birth rate rose (on the taxpayer’s tab), according to a study done by researchers from the University of Texas at Austin. According to researchers, the number of claims for long-acting contraception dropped by more than a third and births paid for by Medicaid shot up by 27 percent.

Of course, there is no way of saying definitively that this will happen in Ohio as well, but it would not come as a shock. As Guttmacher Institute’s Elizabeth Nash stated, “It’s one of the states people look to, to see what the next restriction is going to look like.”

Julia Bryant

Julia Bryant is an Editorial Senior Fellow at Law Street from Howard County, Maryland. She is a junior at the University of Maryland, College Park, pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Economics. You can contact Julia at JBryant@LawStreetMedia.com.

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You just sunk every penny you have into opening a restaurant. After spending years perfecting every detail from menus to music, you forgot one major element: an advertising budget. How will you make sure people experience your culinary genius? Fueled by passion, you do something you know you probably shouldn’t. You write a glowing review of your restaurant on Yelp.

Is the review a lie just because it came from the owner? Not necessarily. Just because a biased party tells you something is good doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not; their recommendation just holds less value than one from a disinterested party.

But, bias fueled by passion and economic interest happens in medical research all the time. Like you and your restaurant review, medical study funders often promote the information best for their cause. They finesse study designs and findings to make results seem more favorable for their product or service. A manufacturer of a new blood pressure drug might play up one specific benefit of their product in a way that makes you believe the drug beats others overall. It’s not fraud or misconduct, it’s just spinning results in a positive way–something any human with a vested interest in an outcome tends to do. Furthermore, data from a study means nothing by itself to most people, so invested parties can play with it as much as they want to tell a good story.

In discussing the interpretation of statistics in Made to Stick, authors Chip and Dan Heath put it this way:

Ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case from a given set of statistics.

Keep reading for more on funding bias and what you can do about it.

How is scientific research funded?

When you read a juicy new bit of research about something that might kill you or change the world as we know it, the study’s funding probably escapes your interest. But any study you read, whether it’s about drugs, medical treatments, nutrition, or even sleep, costs money. Where does the money come from? It can come from government grants, nonprofits, independent companies, and even you. When you buy dish soap, some of that profit might go to funding a Procter & Gamble study on a new cleaning chemical. Some portion of your taxes might trickle down to a government grant and end up in a laboratory. And of course, if you donate to a charity, that money might fund studies supporting that cause.

Money Talks

Since money fuels science, science itself can be shackled by economic interests, and interests of any kind can lead to bias. Even without fabricating results, funders have tools they can use to sway study results.

In a paper titled “Tobacco industry manipulation of research,” Dr. Lisa A. Bero calls out some reasons why research findings might not be as concrete as they seem:

• Any study has a context that can be skewed by framing the study, defining the problem, and sculpting that language of study questions and results.
• Data doesn’t present itself. It’s up to the funders and researchers to deliver it to the world, and this delivery can be nuanced to serve a given purpose.

That covers underlying reasons why bias happens, but how does it happen? The World Health Organization analyzed thousands of books, articles, and other materials to see how bias can occur in drug studies and promotions. Its paper, “Drug Promotion – What We Know, What We Have Yet to Learn,” outlined several ways researchers can skew results:

• Publishing results in multiple journals and with multiple authors. Different researchers can write papers on the same exact study. The multiplication of evidence revealing the same findings makes the results look more credible and can lead to a general overestimation of the studied drug’s treatment power.
• Leaving out unfavorable conclusions. Industry-funded studies left out negative results more often than their nonprofit counterparts.
• Using retrospective design, which looks backward to prove a determined outcome. With a known outcome, it’s easier to manipulate study designs to show X might cause Y.
• Putting focus on some features and leaving out others. Industry-funded studies tend to focus on acute benefits of drugs and stray away from ranking the drug’s benefits overall.
• Publishing only favorable results. If a study doesn’t achieve the desired outcomes, the industry funder can simply choose not to publish it, like a lie of omission.

Now let’s look at some real-world examples. In practice, a common method of skewing public scientific opinion involves funding counter blows to combat damaging research.

Bias in Practice

So we know bias happens, we know how it happens in theory, and in the real world the skewing attempts get even scrappier. In these examples, the industries used their funding prowess to spin the science of others.

Sugar

This NPR article relays the story of Dr. Christin Kearns, a dentist who was shocked when a handout of government advice about diabetes didn’t mention sugar. Detecting the scent of industry involvement, she began digging for evidence of similar foul play in the dental community.

After months of research and scouring through internal beet and cane sugar documents dating back to the 1950s, Kearns found that the industry does in fact push policy, especially when it concerns potentially damaging research. When the sugar industry caught wind of dental professionals’ intentions to tackle sugar consumption, they launched a counterattack to help people combat tooth decay while eating as much sugar as they wanted. They looked into enzymes that busted up plaque and other ways to fight tooth decay.

Tobacco

No surprise here: the tobacco industry’s efforts to combat damaging research have been fodder for many public health case studies. Tobacco companies specialized in contending with the findings of detrimental studies. Their philosophy read something like this: The longer you argue, the longer it takes to make decisions. And the longer it takes to make decisions, the more time we have to continue business as usual before we’re hampered with new policies. The tobacco industry used this philosophy to fight regulations for decades.

The 1950s and 60s saw tobacco companies fighting claims that smoking was bad for you. After that, they gracefully transitioned to denying the harms of secondhand smoke.

Here’s a commercial for Camel cigarettes showing doctors smoking and enjoying cigarettes and even recommending the Camel brand. Their decision to use a doctor as the main character sends a strong message to the public: If smoking was so bad, would a doctor do it?

In the 1990s, tobacco companies moved to using PR campaigns focusing on “junk science” to criticize reports on the risks of tobacco smoke, even from the government.

In 1998, big tobacco and the United States reached an agreement about how tobacco could be marketed and advertised. This Master Settlement Agreement surfaced documents outlining tobacco’s science-fighting strategy that confirmed what many had already suspected. When it came to steering science dialogue, tobacco’s policy was to:

• Pay for, publish, and promote research supporting their goals; and ,
• Suppress and criticize research going against their goals.

Tobacco’s efforts mark some of the first concerted and funded campaigns against science in history. Their efforts demonstrate the power of manipulating public opinion. Luckily, physician opinion is much harder to shape.

Does funding bias influence practice?

Good news: doctors know how to evaluate medical studies.

In a randomized study of physicians’ interpretations of funding disclosures published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found a majority of physicians were fully capable of evaluating research based on academic rigor and were not fooled by common manipulations. In fact, the knowledge that a study was funded by industry caused their evaluation of the study’s rigor and likelihood of prescribing the studied drug to decrease.

What You Can Do

We can’t ignore oodles of research just because it might be biased. Luckily, there are safeguards in place. Title VIII of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA) made researchers start registering and submitting results to clinicaltrials.gov where you can check them out at any time. Individual journals also have publishing regulations protecting us from misleading science. For example, the New England Journal of Medicine publishes information on funding, protocols, and the funding organization’s involvement in the study with all of their articles.

But if you’re feeling less than trusting, you can develop your own methods of evaluating the research you read. When you see something new, check for other studies on the same subject to see if they coincide and take an extra careful look at the study’s design.

This graphic from Compound Interest ranks study methods on a descending scale. Keep this in mind when you’re evaluating research.

Even if it’s just something you see in a magazine, you can look up the original study to investigate the design for yourself and form your own opinion. We have access to more science than ever before. With that comes great power, but also great responsibility. Science can be biased but it’s still up to you whether or not to buy into the bias.

Resources

Primary

World Health Organization: Drug Promotion: What We Know, What We Have Yet to Learn

Additional

Washington Post: As Drug Industry’s Influence Over Research Grows, So Does the Potential For Bias

NPR: Documents Detail Sugar Industry Efforts to Direct Medical Research

Heath, Chip and Dan: Made to Stick

Plos Medicine: Sugar Industry Influence on the Scientific Agenda of the National Institute of Dental Research’s 1971 National Caries Program: A Historical Analysis of Internal Documents

Journal of the American Medical Association: Association of Funding and Conclusions in Randomized Drug Trials: A Reflection of Treatment Effect or Adverse Events?

University of California Museum of Paleontology: Who Pays For Science?

Public Health Chronicles: Tobacco Industry Manipulation of Research

Scientific American: Can the Source of Funding For Medical Research Affect the Results?

New England Journal of Medicine: A Randomized Study of How Physicians Interpret Research Funding Disclosures

New England Journal of Medicine: The Proposed Rule For U.S. Clinical Trial Registration and Results Submission

Ashley Bell

Ashley Bell communicates about health and wellness every day as a non-profit Program Manager. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Business and Economics from the College of William and Mary, and loves to investigate what changes in healthy policy and research might mean for the future. Contact Ashley at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Trusting Scientific Research: Who Funds Our Opinions? appeared first on Law Street.

Higher education is the most important aspect to economic prosperity. Colleges and universities prepare future leaders who will drive national and global economies. As globalization is not a new phenomenon, but an established process, education ties together countries via investments, banking systems, technology, and travel. As a result, the quality of education is on the agenda in many countries across the globe.

President Obama’s college rating system is a highly debated topic across the country, with policymakers and educators casting concerns over its shortcomings and dangers. The current administration has already introduced reform programs in health care and immigration, which were controversial at best; its plan to reform education is no different. It’s an all-encompassing reform that can play out either way. Read on to learn more about the benefits, shortcomings, and possible consequences of Obama’s college rating system.

Do other governments rank colleges?

Colleges and universities across the globe have long been rated by their governments in the hope of establishing the best educational value. Originally, independent agencies or non-profit organizations played the leading role in this task. Later, governments began to regulate and assess higher education. The United States is not the first country to take steps to ensure quality control in education. For example:

• Finland created the Higher Education Evaluation Council.
• Australia came out with the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.
• The European Union has its U-Map.
• Britain assembled an online tool to showcase university statistics and measure college performance.

Some initiatives are more successful than others, but all reflect the need to provide meaningful tools for students and governments to compare educational value. Following the global trend, Obama’s college rating system is an attempt to ensure quality of learning and accountability on the part of educational institutions in the United States.

Why would Obama want to rank colleges?

There are generally three main reasons why the current administration feels the need to address the educational sector, and, specifically, to establish the college rating system: rising student debt, inequality, and falling graduation rates. The picture is rather bleak. The majority of the prospective student body cannot afford college without taking out loans. In addition, there are few jobs available, especially for recent graduates. As a result, some default on their debt, while others struggle for decades to pay back their loans. Unfortunately, not only do colleges charge a lot of money for education, the quality of learning is deteriorating as well.

Rising Student Debt

As more students continue to borrow money from the government to pay for their higher education, the number of those who fail to find a job after graduation and to pay back their loans has increased dramatically over the last decade. According to a recent study, 60 percent of four-year college students graduate with an average $26,500 in debt. In addition, tuition increases every year, prompting concerns over the affordability of higher education. The same study estimates a 231 percent public college tuition increase and a 153 percent private college increase over the last 30 years.

Watch the short documentary below for more information on the increasing costs of tuition and deteriorating value of education in America.

Inequality

Inequality in education is a direct consequence of high tuition. Students whose families cannot afford to pay tuition for their higher education generally have two choices. They can either take out loans from the government, which often lead to decades-long debt, or they can start working low-paying jobs right after high school. Those are two extremes, of course, as some students receive scholarships or combine loans and jobs; however, even if a student qualifies for scholarships based on merit, he won’t necessarily be able to pay the full remaining tuition. Not only does this scenario exclude bright-but-poor students from receiving high-quality education, but it prompts many of them to take out multiple loans that they may not be able to repay.

Watch the shocking video below to understand the realities behind wealth inequality in the United States.

Low Graduation Rates

The number of students who fail to complete their studies has increased throughout the last decade. As of 2013, the United States ranks 13 out of 34 countries measured for college attainment. The Chronicle of Higher Education provides in-depth data and analysis on graduation rates across the country, which vary greatly by the type of the higher educational establishment and its location. Click here to read its most recent overview.

Low graduation rates prompt concerns that the overall quality of learning is deteriorating, even though the quality of learning cannot be measured by graduation rates alone. Students drop out of college for many reasons: financial difficulties, family issues, transfers, or simply because they are taking a break. The current administration, however, believes that colleges need to make sure their students are making progress toward a degree, especially those who receive financial aid.

So, how will rating colleges fix these problems?

Using the college rating system, the Obama Administration hopes to reduce student debt, provide more access and opportunities to low-income students, and improve higher educational standards. The president’s plan is to use these ratings as a mechanism of accountability and transparency. Before taking out a loan, students will have access to information on loan default rates, employment outcomes, and anticipated monthly payments after graduation. If students can make informed decisions, it should help to reduce loan debt. Also, the government will provide more federal funds for those colleges that keep their prices low and improve quality. It should help to quell inequality of access to higher education and raise the value of learning.

What does the college rating system look like?

The Postsecondary Institution Ratings System (PIRS) is a part of the Obama Administration’s effort to provide more transparency and accountability in higher education. The government is planning to fully implement PIRS by the 2015-2016 academic year.

College Scorecard

PIRS is essentially folded into one tool, the College Scorecard, already available online through the College Affordability and Transparency Center. It’s very easy to use, and requires only basic computer skills and internet access. The College Scorecard is still in the process of development; for now it provides information on costs, graduation rates, loan default rates, and median borrowing. The Department of Education is still working on obtaining data on the average income of former undergraduate students. The College Scorecard also provides information on changes in an institution’s cost, making it possible to see if tuition has gone up or down over a certain period of time. In addition, students and their families can search by area of interest, college location, and type of college.

Watch the video below for a detailed guide on how to navigate the College Scorecard.

What does it measure?

PIRS measures three main factors: access, affordability, and outcome. All three can be matched to inequality, debt concerns, and learning quality as the above-cited reasons for establishing such a system in the first place.

• Access comes from the percentage of students who receive Pell Grants, in an effort to obtain some knowledge on how equal or unequal higher educational institutions are.
• Affordability looks at average tuition, available scholarships, and student loan default information, thus looking at debt concerns.
• Outcome measures how many people graduate, how many pursue advanced degrees, and the average income of students after graduation.

In addition to being an information hub for prospective students, the president is planning to seek legislation to allocate financial aid to those institutions that obtain high ratings on PIRS. The current administration emphasizes that before the government designates its funds according to this mechanism, the college rating system should be well established, taking into consideration all of the concerns from university administrators across the country.

In order to receive more financial aid via grants and loans, higher education institutions will have to provide the best value and improve on their performance, hence helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

What is the Obama Administration hoping to achieve?

The Obama Administration hopes to achieve greater accountability and transparency in higher education, especially with regard to the quality of educational institutions, student debt, and income after graduation. The system is meant to empower students and their families to make informed decisions when choosing a college or university to attend.

The president also plans to use the college rating system to aid policymakers who are allocating financial aid to higher educational institutions. It’s believed that such financial incentives will prompt colleges to improve their overall performance. The goal is to keep colleges accountable and transparent, rewarding those who will keep prices down and improve educational value.

The overall goal of the current administration is to decrease student debt and to increase access to higher education for low income students, improving quality of learning along the way.

What do critics say?

Obama’s college rating system is not without its critics who continue to debate its shortcomings and possible negative outcomes. Educational administrators, researchers, and policymakers across the country are troubled with what they see as a rather simplistic approach to rating schools, as well as reliability and validity of the data used, and predicting negative consequences for higher education.

Data and Measurement Problems

To assemble the College Scorecard System, the government obtained data from its own Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). It’s a self-reported data collection mechanism that provides information on first-time and full-time students who seek undergraduate or certificate degrees. It is evident that only a limited population group is measured, completely excluding part-time and transfer students. One of the main concerns here is that PIRS counts transfer students as “drop outs,” which essentially can produce faulty graduation rates.

In addition, as IPEDS is a self-reported tool, there is a danger of missing data elements that can be unevenly distributed depending on data collection practices and the diligence of college officials. The data on loan default rates is also concerning, as it can double-count those students who take out multiple loans.

Some experts and researchers believe that PIRS is based on faulty assumptions. The lack of validity and reliability of the data used can misguide students and their families when they are choosing which college to enroll at. The measurements are also not comprehensive, which can lead to misuse of data and produce inaccuracies in college ratings.

Simplistic Approach

PIRS has also been blamed for being rather simplistic in determining the value of colleges and universities across the country. The critique is centered on the notion that some colleges cannot keep their price tags down as they depend on state funding. One study draws parallels between community colleges in California and Florida on one side and New Hampshire and Vermont on the other. The first two are generously supported by state funds, while the latter two have much lower funding from the state. It’s clear that California and Florida community colleges are able to keep their tuition low, and New Hampshire and Vermont are forced to raise theirs.

Healthcare prices and other external factors can greatly influence tuition rates.. The danger is that those colleges that cannot keep their prices low, even if it’s not their call, will suffer the consequences. They can be punished by receiving no or significantly less funds from the federal government via grants and loans. As a result, with already low state funding and an inability to receive aid from the federal budget, they will be forced to raise their prices even more.

The college rating system also doesn’t provide a distinction between program-specific and institution-wide performance. PIRS measures only the aggregated performance of colleges, failing to recognize successes of specific departments. For example, the criminal justice department at Rutgers University is considered to have one of the most comprehensive curriculums for students who want to work in this field. At the same time, other departments at Rutgers are considered less strong. Because PIRS uses an aggregated performance mechanism, there is a possibility that Rutgers University will receive a low rating on its scorecard. As a result, fewer prospective students will enroll in the criminal justice program, which, in reality, is very strong.

Wage Differences

As was mentioned earlier, the College Scorecard will contain information on post-graduation employment. This data will be released from the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration and forwarded to the Department of Education for further analysis. The main concern here is the disproportionality of wages across professions. For example, business executives and doctors earn higher wages compared to teachers and social workers. Colleges that specialize in liberal arts and the social sciences can be at a disadvantage compared to science and technology-centered schools. Thus, certain higher education institutions can receive low ratings just because of the occupations of their graduates.

Conclusion

Both data problems and the simplicity of the rating system lead to concerns about the future of the higher education sector. Will it produce the desired results or lead to negative consequences?Obama’s college rating system can improve the performance of teachers and learning practices for students; it can decrease student loan defaults and tuition prices; and it can even become an all-encompassing tool of accountability and financial aid disbursement. At the same time, it can further stratify the educational system, widening the gap between exclusive private and second-rate public colleges and universities and hurt liberal arts schools or those with already low state funding. Despite its limitations, PIRS is a starting point on a long journey in developing higher standards, reducing costs, and fostering accountability in colleges and universities across the country.

Resources

Primary

The White House: Fact Sheet on the President’s Plan to Make College More Affordable: A Better Bargain for the Middle Class

The White House: Education at a Glance

The College Affordability and Transparency Center: College Scorecard 

U-Map: The European Classification of Higher Education Institutions

Australian Government: Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency

UNISTATS: Course Assistant

 Additional

American Council on Education:  Rankings, Institutional Behavior, and College and University Choice. 

Chronicle of Higher Education: Graduation Rates by State

Chronicle of Higher Education: Has Higher Education Lost Control Over Quality?

The New York Times: Colleges Rattled as Obama Seeks Rating System

The New York Times: On Bus Tour, Obama Seeks to Shame Colleges Into Easing Costs

MoneyBox: How Bad Is the Job Market for the College Class of 2014?

U.S. News: Report: U.S. Drops in High School, College Grad Rates

Valeriya Metla

Valeriya Metla is a young professional, passionate about international relations, immigration issues, and social and criminal justice. She holds two Bachelor Degrees in regional studies and international criminal justice. Contact Valeriya at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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