(Flickr/Sean MacEntee)

The Obama administration is seeking ideas for its proposal to create a federal college-rating system. 

As Education Week reports, the administration wants technical expertise as the U.S. Department of Education develops a system that would rank colleges and universities and tie university funding to certain criteria like graduation rates:

To assess the performance of colleges, the National Center for Education Statistics is inviting ideas about data elements and metrics to be included, methods of data collection, and ways to weigh the factors in the ratings. The request includes several questions to help frame the input, including questions about how to best share the ratings with the public and how to define peer groups of colleges. The intent of the system is to advance institutional accountability and provide families with information to better assess college value.

Earlier this year, President Obama floated his plan to rank colleges.

"Colleges that keep their tuition down and are providing high-quality education are the ones that are going to see their taxpayer dollars go up," Obama said. "It is time to stop subsidizing schools that are not producing good results, and reward schools that deliver for American students and our future."

Since then, college presidents have expressed their concern, saying the nation’s higher education landscape is far too diverse to create a one-size-fits-all metric. 

In his op-ed in The New York Times this week, the president of Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va., said a government-approved list of colleges might sound like a good idea, but it’s not:

The ratings, proposed by President Obama in August, would evaluate schools based on criteria including tuition levels, graduation rates, how many students receive Pell grants and how much money recent graduates earn. The problem is, the program won’t just shape the choices students make; it will create potentially perverse incentives for the schools themselves.

Of course, if the government is going to create a rating system, tracking the number of students who are actually graduating from college will become more and more important. 

Researchers from the National Student Clearinghouse find of the 2.4 million students who enrolled in the fall of 2007, 56 percent of them finished a degree or certificate within six years. But a growing number of students are transferring, so they’re not being tracked by the government’s standard graduation rate numbers.

Meanwhile, as WGBH reported in September, low-income students and their advocates are urging leaders to adopt the rating system:

WGBH's On Campus wants to hear from you. At a time when the cost of college is soaring, is a college-rating system a good idea?