Thomas Geoghegan, Columnist

Don't Just Rock the Vote, Rank It

Getting more young Americans to the polls is the key to breaking political gridlock. Here's one way to do it.

August 28, 2014 at 5:57 PM UTC

Thomas Geoghegan is a labor lawyer in Chicago. He is the author of "Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement."

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As U.S. college students arrive on campus at summer's end, the soaring cost of higher education has put the institutions they attend under growing scrutiny. As President Barack Obama pointed out in a recent speech, the average tuition at a public four-year college has gone up by more than 250 percent over the last three decades, while the typical American family's income has risen by just 16 percent.

So Obama has proposed a new rating system designed, as he put it, to see "who's offering the best value, so students and taxpayers get a bigger bang for their buck." The metrics he has in mind include: "How much debt does the average student leave with? How easy is it to pay off? How many students graduate on time? How well do those graduates do in the workforce?"