The College Report Card--picked as one of "100 Great Ideas for Higher Education"

I am honored that the National Association of Scholars chose to include, in its 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education, my proposal that all colleges be required to, on its homepage, post a substantive report card on itself, what I call the College Report Card.



It is far more more helpful than, for example, the College Scorecard President Obama announced in his State of the Union address.



I describe the College Report Card in the  Washington Post, and in The Atlantic, the latter which was republished on Stanford's blog on higher education reform.



Not only would a College Report Card enable prospective students to more wisely and easily select a college, that transparency would exert real pressure on colleges to finally treat students as the treasure they are rather than a mere "cost center."



Today, 'four-year" colleges behave as irresponsibly as the researchers who ran the The Tuskegee Experiments. Every year, colleges recruit hundreds of thousands of weak students without disclosing to them that 3/4 such students don''t graduate even if given 8 years, meanwhile having accrued a fortune in debt, little learning, a non-stop assault to their self-esteem, no more employability than they could have had straight out of high school and, critically, the opportunity cost: They could have likely learned far more and become far more employable had they pursued an apprenticeship, the millitary, working at the elbow of an entrepreneur, or taken a short career-prep program at a community college.



It is time to stop giving higher education a free pass. We require every tire, every packaged food, every drug, to provide substantive consumer information. We should require no less of colleges.