Sunday, December 21, 2014

Common Core for Colleges?

Well that's what it looks like with President Obama's new set of initiatives for the 2015-2016 school year. Obama's education department recently released an outline of how they plan to rate two-year and four-year colleges/universities based on accessibility, affordability, and student success/outcome. President Obama wants to tie the $150 billion in federal funding that goes to colleges every year to this rating system in order to help make higher education more affordable and accessible to more students. President Obama said himself, "Colleges that keep their tuition go down and provide a quality education are going to see their funding go up...It is time to stop subsidizing schools that are not providing good results." Now this sounds awfully like the Common Core that has been criticized many times by high school students, parents, and teachers, and I'm sure this system will not be any less criticized.

CBS news reports, "The education department is still working on the best ways to determine what constitutes 'low-performing' or 'high-performing' as well as ways to recognize improved performance over time. In the mean time, they will use the percentage of students in college receiving Pell grants and with parents who have not attended college to measure accessibility, and net cost and family income quintiles to measure affordability. As for success, the education department will evaluate completion rates, transfer rates, and labor market success.

Yes, it's true, colleges are becoming more and more expensive as the years go by, and yes, this is a problem. However, with this system, I'm sure there will still be much opposition.It's just like the Common Core that many people today are opposed to; it has the same sense of collectivism and arrogance. Government officials are not the ones in schools, how do they know how to accurately rate schools? In essence, most colleges are business and will do anything to get the moolah. That may mean admitting more low-income students to boost accessibility or even allow more students to graduate to boost completion rates. When money is on the table, I'm sure many schools will sacrifice quality education for the dough. Obama's intentions are in the right place, but this approach is not far off from the already socially-disapproved Common Core.

1 comment:

  1. I agree with you, even the School District and the SRC does not know what is going on in the classrooms and yet they're the ones making all the decisions, so how will the government officials know what's happening to the colleges or where the money is even going. It's sounds like a good plan at first but honestly when you look more into it, colleges will do anything to have more money and the ones being harm by this is the students. I didn't know anything about this plan prior to reading your post, thank you for educating me! Keep up the good work

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