Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 43

Headquarters of the status quo: College and university trade associations congregate at One Dupont Circle-
an address that, to Washington insiders, is shorthand for the higher ed lobby.

WHO'S AFRAID OF
COLLEGE RANKINGS?
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.
By Laura M. Colarusso and Jon Marcus

Alaina Lancaster

O

n a gray, drizzly morning in February, hundreds of
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 re-

vival. "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 illWashington Monthly

43



Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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