Making Higher Education Outcomes Transparent

Idea

States and the federal government spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year to help support students as they enroll in colleges and universities across the country. And yet, despite this investment, students and policymakers know shockingly little about how well particular schools serve students. The answer to the question, “Is college worth it?” is an unequivocal yes—on average. But the real question is: “In which program, at which college, at which price, and for which students is it worth it?” Regrettably, we can’t answer that question because the private higher education lobby convinced Congress to pass a law to ban the Department of Education from using already-collected information in order to answer it. The Education Policy Program has led the fight to change this—to end what we call the College Blackout.

Incubation

After Congress passed the ban on better data in 2008, the issue was considered a “done deal,” and revisiting it was treated as a political non-starter and a fool’s errand. But New America worked to find solutions and build political will, leading directly to the introduction of a bill in 2011 that would create a work-around to the ban. Future iterations of the bill capitalized on the growing calls for transparency and improved on the legislation, adding new support from policymakers. Future iterations of the bill capitalized on the growing calls for transparency by overturning the ban completely and adding new legislative support. In 2014, New America released a now-seminal report, College Blackout, which shed light on the history of and problems with the ban. We have since worked to build a broad, bipartisan coalition of students, student advocates, colleges, employers, researchers, and other stakeholders to advocate for better data to help answer critical questions about college outcomes.

Impact

Since the release of New America’s report, bipartisan momentum for overturning the ban has skyrocketed. In 2017, Sens. Hatch, Warren, Cassidy, and Whitehouse introduced the College Transparency Act—a bill that has garnered support from dozens of other members of the House and Senate from both parties and over 130 outside organizations. Following the 2018 midterm elections, a New York Times article named the College Transparency Act as one of six key issues likely to break the Washington gridlock