Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 45

tions tend to be major local employers, focal points of civic
pride (including for their sports teams), and vehicles for federal research dollars that fuel regional private-sector growth.
College and university leaders aren't afraid to contact their
representatives in Washington, often at the prompting of
their lobbyists. "They crank out those college presidents to
contact their senators and representatives, and college presidents have a lot of clout," said a former education lobbyist.
"They're doing hand-to-hand combat."
With their geographically dispersed members, groups
like NAICU can usually garner bipartisan support, just as defense contractors typically manage to do by building components for weapons systems in lots of congressional districts.
But One Dupont has also learned to adapt to an increasingly
partisan Washington. In its fight against the administration's
proposed rating system, for instance, it has won the backing
of congressional conservatives who see the move as a classic
case of presidential overreach. That includes Senator Lamar
Alexander, a former Tennessee governor and U.S. education
secretary who serves as the ranking member on the powerful Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. At the
annual NAICU meeting, Alexander, who will likely chair the
committee if Republicans take the Senate in November, received both an award and a standing ovation for his work on
behalf of colleges and universities. The senator, who was once
the president of the University of Tennessee, told the approving crowd that government regulation "wastes much-needed
dollars that should be used for students."
After Alexander collected his award, NAICU's president
raised one last objection to the White House's ratings push.
It was an example of the executive branch usurping authority
that belongs to Congress, Warren said-a violation of the separation of powers. He urged the people in his audience to make
sure their members of Congress were aware of that position.
A few days later, Republican Virginia Foxx of North Carolina and Republican John Kline of Minnesota, chairman of
the House Education and Workforce Committee, both echoed
this complaint in a letter to the president, blasting his "recent
threats to circumvent Congress" in making higher education
policy. Alexander has since said he plans to attach an amendment to an appropriations bill to block the Department of Education from using federal funding to "develop, refine, publish or implement a college ratings system." And two congressmen, Republican Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Democrat
Michael Capuano of Massachusetts, have introduced a resolution opposing the ratings plan. "It shows how smart they are,"
said Amy Laitinen, deputy director for higher education at the
New America Foundation. "What's going to get Congress fired
up? And right now there's huge tension between the legislative and executive branches, so let's get them fired up."
In addition to feeding GOP concerns about presidential
overreach, the higher ed lobby's most potent argument is that
the federal data on which any proposed rating system will be
built is flawed and incomplete, and won't give a wholly accurate picture of the performance of individual institutions. On

this point, even many supporters of the administration's rating
push agree. For instance, the federal government only asks colleges for information about those students who are attending
full-time at the start of their college careers. This means that
the large and growing number of students who begin college
as part-timers, or who transfer to other schools, or who leave
school altogether and then come back as adults, largely don't
show up.
That raises a question: Why is the federal data so incomplete? A big part of the answer is that the higher ed lobby has
worked hard to keep it that way.

bama isn't the first president who has attempted to
inject some measure of accountability into the federal government's investment in post-secondary education. In 2005, George W. Bush's education secretary, Margaret Spellings, appointed a commission to look for ways to reduce the reporting burden the federal government imposes
on colleges and universities while also making higher education more accountable. Known as the Spellings Commission,
the panel endorsed, among other things, the development
of a "student unit record" data system that would follow
individual students to see how long it took them to graduate, how much they spent on their education, and what they
learned. That data, with the names of individual students
stripped out, would then be combined and made available
to consumers so prospective students could compare schools
and see if they were worth the money. By tracking each student from the start to the finish of their college experiences,
the big gaps in federal data would be filled without extra burdens being put on colleges. The government would automatically know, for instance, if someone transferred, even across
state lines, and could adjust the data accordingly.
NAICU and other higher education groups cried foul, asserting that using students' information in this way would violate their privacy. Small-government advocacy organizations
such as Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum jumped into the fray to
protest that the government couldn't be trusted to keep this
data safe. This argument was bolstered by an episode in which
a Veterans Administration analyst's laptop computer with information about more than 26.5 million veterans and activeduty troops was stolen. Though authorities later recovered the
laptop and determined that the thief had never gotten access
to the data, the incident helped strengthen the hand of lawmakers sympathetic to NAICU. Not only did student unit record reform not pass, but Foxx, a former community college
president, successfully pushed a measure that banned the use
of student unit records. It passed relatively easily, with support from both Democrats and Republicans.
Proponents of student unit record keeping, however,
have not stopped pushing for it. Right now, they note, no one
knows if the graduates of a particular university, or of a specific program within that university, are working in their chosen fields, or what their average incomes are, or whether they
have jobs at all. That, say these reformers, is like denying autoWashington Monthly

Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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