Why Can T The Government Make It Easier To Compare College Cost By Annie Lowrey

Annie Lowrey’s article,” Why Can’t the Government make it Easier to Compare College Costs?” published in Slate magazine is a genuine urge to the Government to take action by simplifying the college application process. This is a very cautiously written article to discuss the need of a College Scorecard for students. Why do I say “Cautious”? Ms. Lowrey’s has a warped attitude towards the colleges and universities shown strongly all over the article. “Choosing a college is not easy; the administration should stop implying that it should be.”- Patricia McGuire, President, Trinity Washington University. Every person who has attended a college in lifetime knows this. Although, Annie’s idea has a potential of revolutionizing the Education industry

Lowrey achieves greater efficacy in delivering her point when she mentions the financial aid award letters. “Non-standardized financial aid award letters might be the biggest problem.... But comparison shopping is difficult when you're weighing apples and oranges.” The colleges turn a simple process into a challenging task by preparing award letters that are vague, deceptive and labyrinthine. All colleges strive to offer some basic information to students, which includes cost of the year in college, financial aid the school provides, costs contributed by a student and the prospective gaps fulfilled through other sources. But, most colleges send award letters to prospective students that understate costs they’ll incur at the institution; overstate the generosity of the financial aid packages they offer; and obscure or misrepresent the true bottom-line price they will have to pay. Ms. Lowrey has made this point very clear in her argument against colleges. Cost disclosures are important for automobiles, real estate, credit cards, mortgages, retirement plans, investments, and private student loans. These requirements were established by federal and state laws and not by voluntary industry best

Lowrey tries to prove that the information provided in a college label is enough for a candidate to decide about a college. As she states, “Again, the issue is not a lack of data as much as a lack of easy-to-find, easy-to-compare data...” and uses terms like “ Information overload”, she laboriously creates the need of accumulating and processing loads of knowledge possibly available on a college prospectus or on Internet and college alumni. Although this is an overload but it is ‘Essential Information.’ Reductionism of information or limiting it to one sheet of paper misleads the students. Such reductionism trumps institutional mission, sound faculty judgment about student learning, assessment of student outcomes, etc. This practice generalizes two very dissimilar colleges on its points of scoring and places them at almost interchangeable positions in the scorecard. Therefore, in the end, a scorecard can be compared to a Ninja blender that every household can afford and whirl up information into different recipes. Unfortunately, deciding on a college is not like blending juice in 30