Who's afraid of college rankings?

• Author: Colarusso, Laura M.

OBAMA WANTS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO DISCLOSE HOW MUCH IT ACTUALLY COSTS TO ATTEND DIFFERENT COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES, AND WHAT THEIR SUCCESS RATES ARE. BUT TO DO SO, HE HAS TO WORK AROUND A POWERFUL, LITTLE-KNOWN LOBBY AND ITS REPUBLICAN FRIENDS.

On a gray, drizzly morning in February, hundreds of 1 university and college leaders gathered in the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., for the annual meeting of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, or NAICU. At the top of their agenda was finding a way to defeat a new college rating system proposed by President Barack Obama, which the administration hopes will give consumers a better idea of which schools are worth the tuition they charge.

Once David Warren, NAICU's president, took the stage, the tone of the event shifted from trade meeting to church revival. "We have been under steady, unrelenting pressure," said Warren, who spoke of an "overreaching executive branch" that seeks to use unreliable data to measure the effectiveness of higher education institutions that are vastly different from one another. The rating system would fail to capture "the specific mission of an institution at whose core is where the value can be found." Then the tall, silver-haired former Ohio Wesleyan University president with a booming voice and a divinity degree from Yale dispatched the members of his congregation out into the rain and toward the mist-shrouded Capitol building to deliver the same message to their congressional representatives. "Tell your story to your member of Congress, why this is an ill-conceived notion," Warren urged. "No congressman wants an ugly rating for an institution in his district."

It was a rare glimpse at a lobbying operation that even critics say has been as effective as it is little known: the one that represents American colleges and universities.

NAICU, which advocates for private nonprofit colleges and universities, is one of the "Big Six" trade associations that represent public universities, private universities, community colleges, and other higher education interests. The biggest is the American Council on Education, or ACE, which houses many other higher ed trade organizations in its headquarters at One Dupont Circle--an address that, to Washington insiders, is shorthand for the higher ed lobby.

Virtually unknown outside the Beltway, the denizens of One Dupont have been remarkably effective over the years, as evidenced by the nearly $200 billion the federal government spends annually on higher education, mostly in the form of student financial aid, tax breaks, and research grants. Another testament to the lobby's power is that most of this funding comes with few strings attached. Schools get the money with, by and large, no requirements that they control their costs, assure their quality, or meet other meaningful standards of performance.

But with voters increasingly alarmed about the ever-rising price of college, which has quintupled student loan debt in the past ten years, the Obama administration has begun pushing policies to get better results. Last summer, the president announced that he was directing the Department of Education to use existing federal data to create a system that would rate the performance of each of America's thousands of colleges and universities on such things as graduation rates and net price--the actual amount paid, per student, after discounts and financial aid. The stated aim is to provide students and their parents with more and better information so they can make savvier choices when choosing a college, putting more market pressure on the system.

The ratings are the first step in a broader accountability drive by the administration and some other elected...