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On Bus Tour, Obama Seeks to Shame Colleges Into Easing Costs

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President Obama spoke at the University at Buffalo to outline his strategy for dealing with the ballooning cost of higher education.CreditCredit...Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

BUFFALO — President Obama deplored the rising costs of college on Thursday as he tried to shame universities into holding down prices. He held out the prospect of more federal student aid if they did.

Speaking at the University at Buffalo, where tuition and fees now total about $8,000 per year for New York residents, Mr. Obama said the middle class and those struggling to rise out of persistent financial troubles were being unfairly priced out of American higher education.

“Colleges are not going to just be able to keep on increasing tuition year after year and passing it on to students,” Mr. Obama told an enthusiastic audience of about 7,200 students and others in the university’s auditorium. “We can’t price the middle class and everybody working to get into the middle class out of college.”

The president, who was on the first day of a two-day bus trip across New York and Pennsylvania, said rising prices at colleges were partly driven by the distribution of $150 billion in federal assistance to students. He said colleges that allowed tuition to soar should be penalized by getting less federal aid for their students, while colleges that held down costs should get more of the money.

He announced plans to create a federal rating system that would allow parents and students to easily compare colleges. And he said he would urge Congress to pass legislation to link the student aid to the rating system.

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President Obama was a crowd-pleaser on Thursday at Magnolia’s Deli and Cafe in Rochester.Credit...Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

“It is time to stop subsidizing schools that are not producing good results,” Mr. Obama said to a roar of applause.

The president offered his college affordability proposals as part of a campaign to highlight efforts that his administration says will help the middle class.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Arne Duncan, the education secretary, said the president’s plan aimed to change incentives for colleges that were not doing enough to keep down costs. “We want to see good actors be rewarded,” Mr. Duncan said. “We want to see them get more resources. And when we’re not seeing that kind of commitment, we want to challenge that status quo.”

Higher education experts generally agreed that the plan was important, but a number found the ratings worrisome. “It depends on having complete and accurate data, and there are some areas where the Department of Education does have good data, but others where it does not,” said Molly Corbett Broad, the president of the American Council on Education, the largest higher education trade organization.

For example, she said, the department’s statistics on graduation rates include only students who start and finish at the same institution. And, she said, it is unclear what leads students and families to the college choices they make.

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The president and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in Buffalo. “It is time to stop subsidizing schools that are not producing good results,” Mr. Obama said at the University at Buffalo.Credit...Jason Reed/Reuters

“I’m all for analytics and analysis, but we just don’t know what information, and how much, helps students and families make good college decisions,” she said. “It’s very difficult to write an algorithm for how these decisions are made.”

Mr. Obama’s plan is certain to anger some college officials, who argue that their costs are affected by state funding decisions, the rising cost of health care and other factors outside their control. Mr. Duncan said the administration planned to move slowly as it created the ratings system, in part to listen to the concerns of university administrators.

The plan requires approval by Congress, and reaction on Thursday tended to fall along party lines. Representative John Kline, Republican of Minnesota and the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said in a statement that he was skeptical of Mr. Obama’s proposed rating system.

“I remain concerned that imposing an arbitrary college ranking system could curtail the very innovation we hope to encourage — and even lead to federal price controls,” Mr. Kline said. “As always, the devil is in the details.”

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said: “I’m strongly opposed to his plan to impose new federal standards on higher education institutions. This is a slippery slope, and one that ends with the private sector inevitably giving up more of its freedom to innovate and take risks. The U.S. did not create the best higher education system in the world by using standards set by Washington bureaucrats.”

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In Buffalo, President Obama announced his new plan to decrease college costs. While some students looked on favorably, others said educational problems went far beyond the price of tuition.

A Democrat, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, issued a statement applauding the president’s proposal.

Some higher education experts questioned whether the administration was overstepping its authority.

“The proposal would be a huge change in higher education, with the federal government asserting itself as the definer of institutional goals and policy, and doing it through need-based financial aid,” said Jane Wellman, the executive director of the National Association of System Heads. “The federal government has never been in higher education policy before — it has just administered financial aid — and I’m not sure you can just take that role and stretch it like a rubber band.”

Others were more positive. “It’s kind of exciting that he doesn’t seem to have given up on getting things through Congress, and just retreated to what he can do by executive action, as many people expected,” said Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Teachers College at Columbia University.

She and others agreed that the headline proposal was the plan to issue ratings, and ultimately to link them to student aid. But they said they had their qualms about how well the ratings would work.

“It’s very dramatic, and it will get the conversation going,” Dr. Scott-Clayton said. “The problem is that getting the formula for the ratings right is very tricky, so linking a significant amount of student aid to the rates might be dangerous. I think they know that, and that’s why it wouldn’t start till 2018.”

Mr. Obama’s sleek black bus traveled slowly across a sometimes rainy upstate New York, where he stopped to have lunch at Magnolia’s Deli and Cafe in Rochester with students and professors. From there, the president went to the visitor center of Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, where he donated a framed copy of his remarks for the first bill he signed, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. The bill made it easier for women to make claims of pay discrimination.

Michael D. Shear reported from Buffalo, and Tamar Lewin from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: On Bus Tour, Obama Seeks to Shame Colleges Into Easing Costs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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