By CANTON WINER

MANAGING EDITOR

President Obama, in his effort to boost college affordability and to increase transparency about higher education, announced the White House’s new College Scorecard website in his State of the Union address on Feb. 12. The interactive website allows anyone to look up the average net cost — essentially tuition minus scholarships and grants — of attending a particular school, as well as graduation and loan default rates and data on the amount that the average student borrows.

Transparency is almost always a good thing, and as many prospective college students and their families can attest, figuring out how higher education works can seem impossible.

The White House’s effort to help college applicants and their families make informed college choices is a step in the right direction. There is one category at the very bottom of the scorecard, however, that is cause for concern: “Employment.”

While this category is not yet functional, the Department of Education ultimately hopes to present the average earnings of former undergraduate students who borrowed federal student loans for every school on the scorecard. Given the current job market, it seems rational to emphasize this data. But a growing chorus within the educational sphere suggests otherwise.

“We can all agree that college applicants and their families need to make informed college choices,” Catharine Hill, president of Vassar College, wrote in a Feb. 15 article in The New York Times. “Yet, I am among many economists who would suggest that taking a short view of what college graduates earn early on in the job market is troubling for several reasons.”

Among her objections are that a graduate’s first job may not predict lifetime earnings.

“Different professions have different earnings profiles over time, and students and their families should really care about lifetime earnings, not the salary of their first job,” Hill said.

The “Employment” category also does not appear to take into account students who immediately go on to graduate school, whose incomes would, understandably, be negligible while in graduate school. The category could also add fuel to the “earnings-are-everything” school of thought.

Bill Destler, president of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), said that the category minimizes the importance of creative, fine art and teacher education programs, as well as programs that serve special populations. The current scoring system would give lower scores to schools with these programs, as they often attract students who will have a more difficult time securing a job.

“RIT is the host institution for the federally-supported National Technical Institute for the Deaf, and these students bring a rich diversity to our student body found almost nowhere else,” Destler said. “But while deaf graduates from RIT are employed at a much higher rate than the deaf population as a whole, they still have a more difficult time finding employment and they don’t earn as much on average as their hearing counterparts. Should RIT close this program to look better on the College Scorecard? I think not.”

Yet, the biggest problem with the employment category is that it diminishes the value of a broad education. The category favors a more career-oriented education over the liberal arts education offered by institutions like Fordham. This is a great weakness of the scorecard not only because it makes my Fordham heart cringe, but also because it ignores the reality of our current job market; professions are changing, evolving and disappearing at an astonishing pace.

“A student who receives very specific training during college may have greater success at getting that first job, but may in fact be more vulnerable over time compared to a student with a more general education,” Hill said. “The nature of the labor market has changed radically over the last several decades. While there was a time in the past when people took a job and stayed with that firm for their lifetime, these days, people do not even stay in the same professions — much less jobs — for most of their careers, because those professions are changing, evolving and in some cases disappearing at rapid rates.”

The intellectual dexterity of a liberal arts education may not help recent graduates land their first job, but it undoubtedly gives its students an advantage in the overall job market.

The White House’s push for transparency in higher education is nothing if not well-intentioned. In order to be truly transparent, however, the White House must ensure that the measurements on its College Scorecard are simple enough to understand but still comprehensive in their assessment. College applicants and their families deserve greater access to information, but not at the expense of being misled.

Canton Winer, FCRH ’15, is an American studies major from West Palm Beach Fla.