Editorial: Obama’s education plan not realistic solution

President Barack Obama has had a pretty good week. President Barack Obama has had a pretty good week.

Last Tuesday, Obama delivered a powerful State of the Union address that showed major concerns for the future of higher education. Young people everywhere were impressed with his conviction, and he fought to win their hearts by putting education front and center.

And before you could even tweet #SOTU, he came up with a plan.

In a speech at the University of Michigan on Friday, he flushed out those concerns in the form of a plan that would reward colleges that keep tuition low — and punish those that do not.

Obama’s plan would use campus-based financial aid programs as incentive for colleges to lower their costs.

Under the plan, the government would not only reward schools that keep their tuition rates in check — it would recognize “good value,” which the White House describes as “quality education and training that prepares graduates to obtain employment and repay their loans.”

It seems that the plan is intended to assist low-income students who would benefit from a pervasive decrease in tuition, as well as to help universities themselves: more applicants means a larger pool of talent to select from.

And to make schools less-expensive would mean to increase students’ options, which would mean, in turn, that prospective students wouldn’t necessarily have to opt for the less-expensive choice. They could choose schools based on the resources, rankings and general quality of the institutions instead. And — in theory — such a change could be a huge jump toward innovation and research. Give the quality students the option to go where they want to go.

Furthermore, schools could increase the quality of their students by becoming more competitive. Lower tuition rates means that schools could up the ante of their quality — and with federal funding injected into the schools with reasonable tuition and “good value,” this means that the incentives program could solve the education bubble. Right?

Well, we’re not so sure.

Since such a detailed plan — the apparent first of its kind — has been proposed during an election year, we’d be naive to buy it. It comes off as fresh and innovative, but in actuality, it might just be too unrealistic.

And we don’t think that this plan is based off a deep understanding of the issue. Yes, college tuition has increased remarkably faster than the inflation rate, but more federal control isn’t necessarily a viable solution.

And consider what a policy like this would do to higher education itself. It’s likely that more students would go to school and more students would graduate — and that sounds great on paper. But if we cheapen the institution, what are we really getting out of all that extra education? More graduates who can’t find jobs despite having degrees?

And having Obama pander to voters is just a twisted way of “suggesting” a solution.

Even if the idea sounds good in theory — and even if Obama is expecting young voters like us to hop on board — there’s just not enough evidence that it could be executed in reality.