Laura Clawson, who I really like as one of the most thoughtful FPers, has a diary up basically pooh-poohing Obama's proposals on college affordability, even calling them shameful. Her reason for this is due to Obama not addressing the biggest driver of cost, i.e. state funding going way down. Implicitly in Laura's entire argument is that a)Obama can do something about state behavior(see Obamacare) and b)that there isn't much to reform with college performance and affordability in and of itself. She even had a line about how Obama was willing to go after college professors but not after the real problem, hinting that at least in her view college overhead is not an issue.
So here's the problem with this thesis. State funding is the single biggest reason among many reasons for the cost of college going up. But even with decent state funding, there would still be a long term cost containment issue and projections still show colleges increasing tuition willy nilly. So what Obama is proposing is structural reforms that groups for better college affordability have been pushing forever. He basically wants to create a new ranking system by the US Government that would be used to determine the federal subsidies schools get, and because of that this ranking would get a high profile and become a big deal among schools. So overtime it would create a natural incentive structure for schools to cut cost and increase performance. Is it perfect?? No, a concern is making sure the ranking are full proof from allowing schools shortcuts to do well. But its a real solution and is not on the margins at all. State funding is year to year and beyond Obama's control, harping on him for not solving that problem is pointless, calling him shameful is even worse.