President Obama proposed a path last week to make college accessible and affordable. It’s a well-intentioned goal to restrain soaring tuition and unmanageable student debt.

Unfortunately, the plan involves a massive increase in federal control of higher education, both public and private. Most damaging would be his plan to tie federal money for higher education to a rating system that would be mind-numbingly complex and full of unintended consequences.

The White House fact sheet for the proposal reports that public four-year colleges have increased tuition by an average of 250 percent over three decades, while family income went up only 16 percent. Part of the cause is reduced revenue from states to public universities, with tuition doubling its share of revenues and students graduating more than $26,000 in debt. The details of that may be shocking, but the overall problem is well-known.

But here’s one you’ve heard less about: Of students who started college full time in 2004, only 58 percent earned a four-year degree within six years. Although some may earn a degree later, others are left with debt but no degree. Also burdened are those who do gain a degree in six years or less, but find their earnings insufficient to pay their debt and launch an adult life.

Obama wants the U.S. Department of Education to develop a method by 2015 to rate colleges on affordability, graduation rates and graduate earnings. By 2018, he wants to provide financial rewards to colleges that do well on the ratings. Students who go to these government-approved schools would get bigger grants and more affordable loans.

Providing more information to prospective students to guide their choices is an excellent idea, but letting the federal government judge what works and control where the money goes is not.

The soaring cost of higher education results in large part from the well-intentioned federal decision in the 1960s to make student financial aid easily available. Market forces disappeared from campuses and the predictable result was higher and higher tuition and less investment by states in their public universities.

It’s frightening to imagine all the perverse incentives that would result from federal bureaucrats creating measures to judge what constitutes an effective college education. Lowered standards to increase the graduation rate, for example, would be hard to resist if money were directly tied to that rate.

Obama’s new, well-intentioned program isn’t designed to solve the problems created by the earlier well-intentioned program. The nation’s higher education system includes a multitude of unique institutions that serve a multitude of needs. More government control would damage, not enhance.