US president Barack Obama announced plans to develop a system of ranking higher education institutions?in August 2013, in a bid to ensure the ¡°best value¡± institutions would have access to the most federal funding.

However, US deputy under secretary of education Jamienne Studley wrote in a today that the government now intends to release ¡°new, easy-to-use tools¡± later this summer that will provide universities and students with ¡°more data than ever before¡± so they can compare college costs and outcomes themselves. The tools will not, it has been , create a scoring system for colleges, or group institutions by performance.

¡°This college ratings tool will take a more consumer-driven approach than some have expected, providing information to help students to reach their own conclusions about a college¡¯s value,¡± she wrote.

¡°And as part of this release, we will also provide open data to researchers, institutions and the higher education community to help others benchmark institutional performance.¡±

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The rankings proposal had received a mixed reception. It was criticised by the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, which said the system could ¡°undermine a much-needed opportunity to improve transparency and accountability in a meaningful way¡±, while F. King Alexander, president and chancellor of Louisiana State University, told Times Higher Education that the report cards would bring an end to the practice of mis-selling the benefits of higher education to students and parents.

Kim Cassidy, the president of Bryn Mawr College, a women¡¯s liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, has said it would be an ¡°extraordinarily difficult task¡± to produce a metric that would be fair to all institutions.

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Ms Studley added that while ¡°no single measure is perfect and many important elements of education cannot be captured by quantitative metrics¡±, data on the performance of universities ¡°drives the conversation forward to make sure colleges are focused on access, affordability and students¡¯ outcomes.¡±?