This week President Obama outlined a new series of proposals to help Americans deal with the rising price of college. Addressing college costs has been a priority of the president’s from early on in his first term, but this is probably the most comprehensive set of proposals that have been released at one time. He described them on a two-day, two-state bus tour of college campuses.

There is a lot packaged in the president’s proposals, and in the next couple of blog posts I will provide analysis of some of the key pieces. The proposals fall under three main topics:

• Provide incentives for both higher education institutions and students to link financial aid to performance;
• Encourage innovation on the part of colleges and universities to come up with new pathways toward less expensive degrees and provide better information to students and parents; and
• Make loan debt more manageable for those who borrowed to pay for college.

None of these are new topics; over the course of the last four years, the president has talked about all three of these at one time or another. The fact that the president has packaged his solutions to these issues together in a comprehensive fashion is an indication that the proposals will likely form the centerpiece of President Obama’s plans for reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which is due this year.

As with any federal proposal that threatens the autonomy of the over 6,000 postsecondary institutions that participate in the student financial aid programs authorized by Title IV of the Higher Education Act or imposes a new regulatory burden on them – as this will likely be described by the higher education industry – there is going to be a lot of pushback from colleges, universities, and their lobbying organizations in Washington. Probably the proposal that will garner the most attention will be the proposal to link federal financial aid to institutional and student performance, or in the words of the president, it was “time to stop subsidizing schools that are not producing good results, and reward schools that deliver for American students and our future” (as quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education).

As I said, I will provide more detailed analysis of and reaction to the president’s proposals in the next two blog posts. So stay tuned.