This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 23rd, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President's plans for higher education include a race to the top type fund for universities and crafting a federal system to

make schools more comparable. But none of it would take hold until he's well out of office.

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, breaks it down.

Well, the President put out a lot of proposals what he'd like to do for higher education.

Most of them are not terribly concrete.

The main thing he would like to do is put out information, data about colleges and universities,

graduation rates for each school, earnings of graduates for each school,

but that data actually already pretty much exists.

You can find that at US News on pay scale, places like that. The thing that would really maybe give it some muscle

is that he would also like to condition a school's ability to receive student aid on how they do in ratings based on that data.

And that might sound great, especially if you're inclined to like price controls.

But if you do like price controls, none of that is scheduled to happen until 2018, according to his plan.

Now that's pretty important because one that's just far away, and two, he's not going to be president anymore in 2018. There's I think very

little chance of that happening and we'd have to get through Congress. But that's

the main thing he has plan and he has a few other little things. He'd like to have a billion dollar race to the top for higher education

where states and schools that don't raise their prices too high might get some

money he's got a 260 million dollar innovation fund where

basically he would have the Secretary of Education pick and choose, you know, I like this

massive open online course provider, I don't like this idea and we'll give

them a little seed money.

...