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“Datapalooza.” Here’s the reference: “New college ratings will help students compare the value offered by different colleges,” the fact sheet said. “The Department of Education will enlist entrepreneurs and technology leaders with a ‘Datapalooza’ to catalyze new private- sector tools, services, and apps to help students evaluate and select colleges. The effort will be complemented by earnings information by college that will be released for the first time on [the] administration’s College Scorecard this fall.” Whatis a datapalooza? Apparently, itis a festival of, or related to, data. The White House and the Education Department hosted such an event Oct. 9. Students and parents are arguably awash in data now, much of it conflicting and confusing. Some would say more is better. Few would argue that better data would be best of all for the consumer. The yen for better data is shared not just by Obama but also by some colleges. Start with graduation rates. Now, the federal government measures how many students graduate within four years or six years of starting college. But it only measures that for students who are first-timers, who are enrolled full-time and who don’t transfer from one institution to another, omitting a huge share of the college population. Millions of students are part-timers. Community colleges with excellent records of getting students into prestigious four-year schools are not rewarded for their efforts if those students fail to pick up an associate’s degree before they transfer. Nor are four-year colleges that give transfer students or former dropouts a second chance and help them get a bachelor’s degree. The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, which represents schools such as the University of Maryland, is spearheading an effort to improve this flawed metric, using not only federal data but also information from the nonprofit National Student Clearinghouse to track degree completion for students who move from one school to another. One question Education Secretary Arne Duncan will face, as he confers with colleges to create a ratings system within the next two years, is what kind of graduation rate the government will use. Another is what kind of data the government will report on income of college graduates. All we know about the federal rating metrics at this point are rough sketches from the fact sheet, highlighting these potential factors: “access, such as percentage of students receiving Pell grants; affordability, such as average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt; and outcomes, such as graduation and transfer rates, graduate earnings, and advanced degrees of college graduates.” The plan envisions that ratings will be tied to student aid formulas by 2018, if Congress agrees. That is a big if. It’s also a year after Obama’s term ends. There is nothing in the plan that would force states to give more funding to public higher education, one of the key cost drivers in tuition. The president recognized the issue, touting a proposal that he has made before — a “Race to the Top” incentive fund of $1 billion for higher education. This fund would aim to spur state reforms and reward states that maintain strong higher education funding, much as an identically named fund for K-12 education did in 2009 and 2010. Butitis unlikely to win congressional approval. Obama’s plan highlights innovation. The president gave a major shout-out to a movement to award degrees based not on how much time students spend in class but on how well they master their material, citing an experiment under way at Southern New Hampshire University and one that is about to launch at the University of Wisconsin. “So the idea would be if you’re learning the material faster, you can finish faster, which means you pay less and you save money,” Obama said Thursday in a speech at the University at Buffalo. This notion is indeed revolutionary in academia because most degrees are awarded based on the concept of a credit hour — which is a rough measure of the time a student spends doing work in and for a course. Obama also underscored the online learning movement, which has gained steam in recent years, saying that it holds out the promise of reducing costs. Carnegie Mellon, Arizona State and Georgia Tech universities won coveted presidential mentions in the speech. So did the University of Maryland, in the fact sheet. Fans of massive open online courses, or HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028642