Inside Higher Ed has more information on Watch Lists proposed in the HEA re-authorization bill currently before the house of Representatives. Read the excerpt below:

Who Should Be Ashamed?

Even as they scramble for positions on some lists (”best colleges,” “top grant recipients” and so forth) colleges have lots of lists they want to stay off of: AAUP censure, NCAA probation, and others.

The idea that colleges would take steps to avoid being on bad lists is behind a measure drawing bipartisan support in Congress — and infuriating many college officials. A measure in the bill to reauthorize the Higher Education Act would create “watch lists” of institutions with tuition increases above the average for their sector. The hope is that colleges may moderate increases to avoid ending up on the list — or be exposed for faulty management if they do. Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, a California Republican who has been pushing the idea for some time, issued a press release that said the watch lists will “shine a spotlight on excessive tuition increases.”

The legislation comes at a time that many in Congress are also raising questions about large college endowments and asking if the wealthiest colleges couldn’t somehow spend more of their endowment or other funds and minimize tuition increases. But a review of existing data suggests that the colleges that would end up on the watch list aren’t terribly wealthy. Rather, they seem to fall into two groups: public institutions in states where appropriations are tight, and private colleges whose operating budgets are tuition driven because endowments are small.

In fact, while many experts believe that colleges — and especially the wealthiest ones — can do more to control their own costs and, in turn, what they charge to students, they point to lots of problems with the dividing lines this bill would draw.

Take the colleges with mega-endowments — the places some think could afford to be free. Of the wealthiest 10 private universities (a club you need about $5 billion to join), not a single one of them would end up on the watch list. The average tuition and fee increase for private, four-year colleges this year was 6.3 percent and the top 10 in endowment wealth didn’t have a tuition rate that hit even 6 percent (five were in the mid-5 percents, and the rest were lower still).

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Among the institutions that would certainly not need to worry about ending up on the watch list is Princeton University, which this year froze tuition (although it had a healthy increase in room and board charges, which don’t count for getting an institution on the watch list).