Spellings describes college plan

WASHINGTON – Education Secretary Margaret Spellings launched plans Tuesday to redefine the college experience, promising less confusion and more results for families.

Spellings said she would make a handful of changes on her own and start building support for some of the more sweeping ideas that came from her higher education commission.

Chief among them is the creation of a massive information-sharing system, facilitating access to statistics on how colleges and universities are performing. It would require vast data collection on individual students, already raising privacy concerns in some corners.

Spellings also pledged to make it easier for people to apply for financial aid and to compare the price and the value of one school to another. She spoke of more federal college aid but would not endorse a specific request to increase the dollar amount of Pell Grants, as her commission wanted.

Sensitive to how colleges would react to her plans, Spellings heaped praise on them. Then she mocked the idea that everything is fine.

“Is it fine that college tuition has outpaced inflation?” she asked in a National Press Club speech. “Is it fine that only half our students graduate on time? Is it fine that students often graduate so saddled with debt that they can’t buy a home or start a family? None of this seems fine to me.”

Even with the leverage of her office and the ear of President Bush, Spellings will need help to turn the ideas into action. In most cases, she will need support from Congress, governors, state boards of education, and a complex mix of public and private colleges.

Her overarching theme is to make everything about college – choosing one, affording one, succeeding in one – easier for families. Parents should be able to shop for a college as simply as they shop for a car, she said, with a clear expectation of what they will get.