College-rating proposal shines spotlight on powerful lobby

Jon Marcus:

The annual meeting of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities this year had the tone of a revival meeting.

“We have been under steady, unrelenting pressure,” declared the organization’s president, David Warren, who spoke of “an overreaching executive branch” he said sought to use unreliable statistics to measure the effectiveness of higher-education institutions that are vastly different from each other.

Warren was talking about proposed ratings of colleges and universities the White House says would help consumers see what they’re getting for their tuition dollars. He said these would fail to capture “the specific mission of an institution at whose core is where value can be found.”