A new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education is titled:
“College Rankings Are ‘a Joke,’ Education Secretary Says”
I thought the article was good. Here is the link. It is paywalled, so I’ll put the full text in a comment.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/college-rankings-are-a-joke-education-secretary-says
Here is the full text of the article:
College Rankings Are ‘a Joke,’ Education Secretary Says
By Brianna Hatch
Chronicle of Higher Education
AUGUST 11, 2022
MANDEL NGAN, AFP, GETTY IMAGES
Miguel Cardona, the U.S. secretary of education
Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona called college rankings “a joke,” and took aim at selective colleges’ obsession with them, as he made a broader push on Thursday for closing stubborn equity gaps in the nation’s college-graduation rates.
“Many institutions spend enormous time and money chasing rankings they feel carry prestige, but in truth do little more than Xerox privilege,” Cardona said, attributing the phrase to the president of a historically Black college.
There’s a “whole science behind climbing up the rankings” that leads to misplaced priorities, Cardona said. The best-resourced colleges are playing a prestige game instead of centering “measures that truly count,” he said. “That system of ranking is a joke.”
Cardona specifically criticized the use of standardized-test scores, peer-assessment surveys, and alumni donations as key metrics, as is the case in the U.S. News & World Report rankings.
“You compete for the most affluent students by luring them with generous aid, because the most well-prepared students have the best SAT scores and graduate on time. You seek favor from your peers, from other elite schools, with expensive dinners and lavish events because their opinions carry clout in surveys,” he said. “And then you invest in the most amazing campus experiences that money can buy because the more graduates who become donors, the more points you score.”
Cardona called for a “culture change” in higher ed so that institutions would value inclusivity, use data to help students before they dropped out, and create more-accessible pathways for adult learners, rural students, and first-generation students.
“Let’s confer prestige on colleges’ breaking cycles of poverty. Let’s raise the profiles of institutions delivering real upward mobility, like all of you,” Cardona told attendees, echoing an essay he wrote for The Chronicle on Thursday. “Let’s turn the universities that walk the walk on equity into household names.”
The secretary spoke at a summit focused on college completion, where officials from the California Community College system, Arizona State University, Davidson College, and some 40 other institutions discussed how to increase attainment rates and what students from marginalized backgrounds need to succeed.
The Biden administration deemed college completion a priority last year, with the president calling for a $62-billion investment in increasing higher-education attainment over 10 years. A proposal introduced last year in the U.S. House of Representatives called for spending $9 billion over seven years. The money would create a “college-completion fund,” with institutions competing for grants to support programs and efforts to increase student success.
Ultimately, just $5 million was allocated to the college-completion fund in the 2022 fiscal-year budget. The Education Department on Thursday invited HBCUs, tribal colleges, and minority-serving institutions to apply for grants from that pot of money. Spending bills for the 2023 fiscal year announced last month by the Senate Appropriations Committee included a proposed $75 million for the fund.
Here are three other themes Cardona highlighted during Thursday’s event:
Colleges must move urgently to better serve underrepresented students.
As college leaders head into the fall semester, Cardona said, they need to “maintain the level of urgency” from the last two pandemic-disrupted years to “change what we know needs changing.”
“My fear is that we go backwards with regards to our urgency, that we go back to the systems that serve some students better than others,” Cardona said. “The system was disrupted for us. Let’s not build it back the way it was that didn’t work.”
While race and diversity have become divisive topics in some states, campus leaders shouldn’t back down.
For some colleges, even having conversations about change — especially when race and diversity are involved — has become a challenge. Cardona told college leaders to rely on data to tell the story.
“If we look at the data, and we see that some children are achieving more than other children, it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that all children can achieve,” Cardona said. “The issue of helping children succeed — that doesn’t have party lines.”
To help students with basic needs, colleges should continue to embrace partnerships.
To close equity gaps, colleges should focus on fulfilling students’ basic needs, Cardona said. Many students face housing and food insecurity as well as mental-health challenges. “If you think college completion doesn’t involve that, you’re missing the point,” Cardona said.
Partnerships across institutions and within communities became the norm during the pandemic. That approach should continue, Cardona said. “You don’t have to do it all. You don’t have to be the mental-health expert,” he said. “Collaborate with the village around you.”
Colleges can’t just assign “technical Band-Aids to adaptive problems,” Cardona said. Instead, higher ed needs to shift its mind-set to one where “we’re looking out for the whole child,” Cardona said. “We’re meeting them where they are.”
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Brianna Hatch
Brianna Hatch is a reporting intern for The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @BriHatch1 or email her at brianna.hatch@chronicle.com.
Direct quote from his remarks pretty much sums up what colleges want. And it reflects in the rankings. I don’t see the problem with rankings overall. If you want things to change it’ll have to be before college not during.
There are many things about college rankings that are bizarre. As I have mentioned before, while UF is at 28 in USNWR and Texas is at 38, I couldn’t find a single major where UF was ranked higher than Texas. Most of the time, especially in the most desired majors, the difference was significant. Both are fine universities but something is obviously broken.
However, many people take this point too far, and claim things like going to “prestigious” and “highly ranked” schools do not offer a benefit compared to “lower ranked” schools with less “prestige.” In many cases, this is absolutely not true.
I think college rankings measure many of the wrong things. What someone’s SAT/ACT score is says little about the quality of a college. What a person learns and how much growth they have from an entering first year to a graduate says a whole lot. That’s what I care about. And though there are colleges that participate in tests to measure that data, it is very rarely shared publicly. I’m afraid that focusing on completion rates might result in the watering down of standards in order to have students finish, but not necessarily provide students with the skills expected of a college graduate.
The initial problem is the Secretary’s mischaracterization of college students as children, as if college were merely an expected extension of K12 and with the same goals.
I agree with this to a point. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, in part. Prestige begets prestige. We see it in academic science all the time (my field). The studies in the fanciest journals come from the fanciest labs, but are not necessarily a proxy for quality or impact. Oh sure, they’ll get you places, but they don’t mean you’re a wonderful scientist. That’s just another example of a system where the elite get what they want based partly on money and connections.
I think what the secretary is really trying to say is that he doesn’t think the focus on prestige serves the overall population of students well at all. There is a dearth of focus on helping the students who need the help the most. (I agree with this, and don’t even get me started on “gifted” programs. Not gonna stir the pot on that one LOL!)
The students who need the most help attend community college and are largely poor adults. Perhaps he should focus his efforts there.
I don’t have a blanket objection to rankings - they can be helpful as long as they’re not used as the be-all-end-all of college searches. But I do think the USNWR methodology is problematic. They use measures that assure the elites stay at the top of the list which isn’t necessarily an accurate representation of the “best colleges”. I understand the business rationale behind that but readers should factor that in. It leads to outcomes like this:
Yes, I’d assume this is part of his stragegy.
I don’t understand this. The most affluent students aren’t getting aid from most elite colleges (which is the set of schools he’s talking about), because most don’t give merit aid.
It’s true higher income students have higher SAT/ACT test scores.
Schools that meet full need, or close to it, tend to have higher grad rates because of affordability (finances are one of the top reasons that students drop out of college)…so the 50% or so of students who have need at the more selective schools do indeed graduate at high rates.
Not sure what Cardona can do about millions of parents and schools who care about college rankings. The elites don’t do well when ranked on social mobility/lifting students out of poverty, which we’ve talked about on many other threads.
I thought the same, not sure if this was confusing in his actual speech, or the article is just poorly written. Regardless, as most CCers know, I am in the camp of increasing investment in pre-k to 12 because that is where the US is falling woefully short.
I think USNWR, especially for engineering, is completely specious. It uses one “metric,” institutional reputation. There nothing about quality of instruction, facilities, or outcomes.
My favorite head scratchers are Cal Poly and Harvey Mudd. CP is #2 in every ranked category of engineering among schools that don’t offer PhDs, yet they rank 7th overall. HMC, a fine institution, ranks #2 overall in engineering, but #5, #4, #3, and #4 in Civil, CompE, EE and ME respectively. They don’t offer any of those majors. 
Overall, I find that rankings offer little to no value when it comes to determining what a student’s experience and outcome will be like.
I’m guessing you went to a high ranked college. Great use of the word ‘specious’.
It does seem to happen often…schools are ranked in subjects they don’t formally offer.
There are enormous problems with American higher education-affordability, completion rates, lack of career counseling. A focus on a magazine ranking of primary interest to upper middle class and upper class parents is not worthy of a cabinet member’s time but says volumes about his personal focus.
I went to MIT…Missouri In Town. Go Tigers! 
(Not sure how you are getting rankings of “major(s)”, but no matter…)
That said, it is easy (or used to be) to compare the the individual scores of individual school in USNews subscription service to see how/why one is ranked higher.
wrt article: Cardona should apply his thesis to K12, IMO. Improve the high school output and colleges could easily do what he recommends.
I’ve never been a fan of the alumni giving proxy, but its a small % of the total rankings.
Which ‘measures’ would you prefer that they change, and to what? (A common one is Peer Assessment, which I personally agree with, warts and all…)
Also concur, but my solution is to fix K12, so fewer college students “need the help”.
(And by focusing on K12, not just the small % that attend college, we end up with a more educated populace, even if the HS grads go into the trades.)
Perhaps I should have said “departments”…
I agree wholeheartedly. It starts before kindergarten. WIC, CHIP, and Head Start are incredibly successful programs, and I wish there were more like them. They pay huge dividends in the health, welfare, and education of the children that use them. As someone who was once poor enough to use WIC and CHIP, I speak from at least some experience.
Paying highly qualified teachers and social workers good salaries to spend lots of time with each student in PreK-12 is perhaps the best investment we can make for future college success.