Knowing Before You Go

Knowing Before You Go

The American Enterprise Institute today hosted a discussion of the Student Right to Know Before You Go Act, introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and co-sponsored by Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). The two senators, both of whom are known for working across party lines, briefly discussed the legislation and were then followed by a panel of higher education experts. Video of the discussion will be available on AEI’s website shortly.

The goal of the legislation, as the senators discuss in a column in USA Today, is to provide more information about labor market and other important outcomes to students and their families. While labor market outcomes are rarely available in any systemic manner, this legislation would support states which release the data both at the school level and by academic programs. This sort of information cannot be collected at the federal level due to a restriction placed in Section 134 of the Higher Education Act reauthorization in 2008, which bans the Department of Education from having a student-level data system of the sort used in some states.

While nearly everyone across the political spectrum agrees that making additional data available is good for students and their families, there are certainly concerns about the proposed legislation. One concern is that the availability of employment data will make more rigorous accountability systems feasible, even though state-level data systems can only track students who stay within that state. This concern is shared by colleges, which tend to loathe regulation, and some conservatives, who don’t feel that the federal government should regulate higher education.

Additionally, measuring employment outcomes does place more of a focus on generating employment over some of the other goals of college (such as learning for learning’s sake). The security of these large unit-record datasets is also a concern of some people; I am less concerned about this given the difficulty of accessing deidentified data. (I’ve worked with the data from Florida, which has possibly the most advanced state-level data system. Getting access is extremely difficult.)

Although I certainly recognize those concerns, I strongly support this piece of legislation. It would reduce reporting requirements for colleges, since they would work primarily with states instead of the federal government. (In that respect, the legislation is quite conservative.) It makes more data available to all stakeholders in education and provides researchers with more opportunities to examine promising educational practices and intervention. Finally, it allows for states to make more informed decisions about how to allocate their scarce resources.

I don’t expect this legislation to go anywhere during this session of Congress, even with bipartisan support. Let’s see what happens next session, by which time I hope we are away from the “fiscal cliff.”