The US Department of Education’s first-ever chief economist, a Columbia and Princeton expert in education and labour markets, is promising much-improved systems to assess the relative value of institutions.

The inaugural appointee, Jordan Matsudaira, already serves in the department as a deputy undersecretary and is taking the chief economist title in part to emphasise the administration’s determination to formalise and expand its use of academic expertise in policymaking.

The Department of Education is an $88 billion (£71 billion) operation that annually distributes about $30 billion in Pell Grant money to low-income college students and manages the distribution of $45 billion in government-backed student loans. Dr Matsudaira will head a team of about half a dozen experts aiming to bring the department the kinds of field-specific economic expertise already found at other federal agencies.

“This is not a 100 per cent new” approach to running complex government departments, Dr Matsudaira said in an interview, “but adding the capacity to be able to bring in top-tier academic policy researchers to be able to inform these questions”.

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Dr Matsudaira already sits at the , having served as chief economist on Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, as an associate professor of economics and education policy at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and as a visiting associate professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University.

His past work involves developing the College Scorecard,  the government has been promising for years as a place where prospective students and others can compare institutions on measures that include average costs, programme offerings, and measures of retention, graduation and eventual workplace salaries.

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But the scorecard has struggled to gain an audience, for reasons that include a lack of necessary data and a web-based interface that users often describe as confusing.

Dr Matsudaira acknowledged the need for improvement in the tool, which he first began developing in the Obama administration. Problem areas, he said, included the need to better guide students based on their specific backgrounds and financial circumstances.

“I think we all agree,” he said, “that that is not a finished product yet, and we still have a way to go.”

That view of the challenge may suggest a fundamentally mistaken goal, outside experts warned. One of them, Elizabeth Popp Berman, an associate professor of organisational studies at the University of Michigan, said the Education Department through the new appointment “is signalling its commitment to a framework in which education is first and foremost a human capital investment whose success should be measured primarily in terms of wage outcomes”.

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Dr Popp Berman is the author this year of Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy, a critique of the growing role of economists in government decision-making. “The greatest threat to higher ed is not a lack of information about post-college wages,” she said, “but a broken financing system that punishes those who make the ‘wrong’ choices, or are simply unlucky, with heavy debt loads.”

Another expert, Jack Schneider, an associate professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said the data that is publicly available for assessments of colleges could be too limited to produce good measures of what higher education provides its students and their communities.

Persisting in the face of that reality, he said, posed the threat of real harm, as has already been widely recognised in the popular US News & World Report rankings that are seen as incentivising such behaviours as colleges avoiding low-income students.

“We can't say that the consequences are unforeseen if we see negative, unintended consequences like schools gaming the scorecard, like families acting on that information, and in so doing, exacerbating inequality and segregation,” Dr Schneider said.

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Dr Matsudaira, however, described his new job as heavily focused on helping disadvantaged students, through projects that include revising the government’s income-driven student loan repayment plans so that they benefit the people who most need them.

But even top-level economic analysis has its limits, Dr Matsudaira said, given that the department cannot directly collect information on the earnings of former students over time. “And that’s a real limitation,” he said, “for us to be able to think about how the student loan repayment plans that are based on student incomes are likely to perform.”

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paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com