Obama puts federal weight behind calls for college affordability

In the first State of the Union address of his second term, President Obama asked Congress on Tuesday night to limit looming cuts in education and research, and called on lawmakers to link some federal student aid to college “affordability and value.”

For the second year in a row, Mr. Obama used the speech to take colleges to task over rising tuition, warning that “taxpayers can’t keep subsidizing higher and higher and higher costs for higher education.”

“Colleges must do their part to keep costs down, and it’s our job to make sure that they do,” he said, urging Congress “to change the Higher Education Act so that affordability and value are included in determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid.”

He also said his administration would release on Wednesday “a new ‘College Scorecard’ that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criterion—where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.”

—From an article by Kelly Field in the Feb. 12, 2013 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Read the complete article here.