@roycroftmom: Have you actually read the article? There is a difference between the article’s title and what the Secretary was doing and saying at this conference. Indeed, it seems this conference was focusing on precisely the things you are complaining about the Secretary. You are mistaking the magazine’s focus with the Secretary’s “focus”.
Secretary Cardona seems to be focusing on the key issues, much more so than his predecessors.
Yeah, I’d like to know more about the context of his remarks. He could have been addressing someone else’s comments or questions. He was at a summit full of representatives from a bunch of colleges. Many colleges are pretty focused on college rankings, so perhaps it wasn’t out of place to discuss in that setting.
The publication it appeared in is one read almost exclusively by college faculty and administrators. There’s quite a bit of chatter about it on academic Twitter, but mostly amongst professors (who almost entirely agree with him, FWIW).
Well, let’s take another issue of primarily UMC interest, say, international internships. Very popular among affluent students,and hopefully one never addressed at all by the Ed secretary, just as rankings should not have been, IMO. I would prefer he stay focused on the key problems and not get caught up in a sidebar not that important to his job.
Methinks the context of his remarks was in the sub-title of the posted article: a “summit focused on increasing college-graduation rates.”
“There’s quite a bit of chatter about it on academic Twitter, but mostly amongst professors (who almost entirely agree with him, FWIW).”
Well sure, agreeing on his pov is a no-brainer, particularly in the education field. But his points ignore the “root causes,” as our Veep might say.
I meant the immediate, more specific context. Was he giving a prepared speech wherein he planned to bring this up out of the blue? Or was he responding to attendees bringing up the topic? Was this a topic that was already up for discussion at this summit? That’s what I meant by context.
It does not appear to be a no-brainer to agree with his remarks, since some on this thread don’t think that rankings are an important thing for any of his attention. I’m sure that there are many others who would agree that the rankings aren’t a big issue.
I think he seems to have a pretty good handle on some of the root causes and is trying to address them. Although the article didn’t mention him talking about K-12, his thoughts on helping students succeed in college (when the actual colleges can do anything about it), seem like they’re targeting some root causes. We may be interpreting his remarks differently, since I’m viewing them through the lens of a college employee (like the other attendees) 
Looks like Cardona also wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Please keep in mind that the audience for this essay is exclusively college employees! So he is focused on education at the college level in this essay. It’s paywalled so full text is pasted below the link.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-new-vision-for-college-excellence
A New Vision for College Excellence
Upward mobility should be the rule, not the exception.
By Miguel Cardona
AUGUST 11, 2022
A college degree can change the trajectory of a student’s life. I should know. I grew up in a working-class community. I was the first in my family to attend college, thanks in large part to financial aid and access to a public university.
While in college, a voice in my head sometimes questioned if I really belonged, but I had mentors and family members who encouraged me. And on graduation day, my diploma felt weightier than a rolled-up piece of paper. It was as if all the sacrifices of my parents and grandparents were wrapped inside it — especially my grandfather, who moved with my grandmother to Connecticut from Puerto Rico, where he had cut sugar cane, to seek better opportunities for future generations of Cardonas.
Ultimately, even though I never would have envisioned it during college, my degree prepared me to be the leader I am today, serving in President Biden’s cabinet.
I recognize that stories like mine are too often the exception, not the rule.
A college degree remains one of America’s surest paths to well-paying, rewarding careers. But too many underserved students — especially students of color — are left behind.
Historical funding inequities, state budget cuts, and decades of lagging federal support for Pell Grants have shifted college costs to students and deprived our most inclusive institutions of resources to invest in student success.
The consequences are heartbreaking.
At our four-year institutions, 60 percent of Black undergraduates and nearly half of Latino undergrads never make it to commencement day. They wind up with the worst of both worlds: student debt and no degree.
Some of the most important innovations in higher education are being driven by institutions that get little glory.
Meanwhile, too many institutions spend enormous resources to climb college rankings and compete for the most affluent, highest-scoring students.
Yet some of the most important innovations in higher education today are being driven by institutions that get little glory but that are narrowing gaps in access to college opportunity and accelerating their graduates’ economic mobility.
Historically Black colleges and universities, Hispanic-, Asian American-, Native American-, Pacific Islander-, and other minority-serving institutions, community colleges, and state and tribal colleges and universities enroll more than three-quarters of undergraduates nationwide, despite chronic underfunding. Many are making real strides on college-completion rates and inclusive student success.
We can realize a new vision for college excellence — one defined not by privilege, legacy, and selectivity, but by equity, inclusivity, and real upward mobility for students of color, immigrants, working parents, adult learners, and rural and first-generation college students.
Today, dozens of college presidents and higher-education leaders will attend a summit hosted by the U.S. Department of Education, where they will tell their stories and share promising practices to achieve more-equitable outcomes for students.
We’ll hear from California State University at Fullerton about how it is improving the credit-transfer process, which too often makes the path to graduation a longer, more expensive journey for transfer students.
We’ll learn from Georgia State University about how it helps advisers use data to get the right support to students who are at risk of dropping out. In just over a decade, those efforts have helped increase graduation rates by more than 20 percent.
We’ll gain insights from the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, which offer students academic support, textbook subsidies, Metrocards, and other resources. Students in the programs are graduating at double the rate of their peers not in the programs.
Those examples are not just lightning in a bottle. They can be replicated elsewhere. In fact, three Ohio community colleges already have adopted CUNY’s model.
And thanks to the American Rescue Plan, which was enacted last year, institutions across the country are innovating.
At Amarillo College, in Texas, ARP dollars have expanded the reach of its services, connecting students to government benefits, mental-health support, and other programs to help them overcome personal and financial challenges to graduation. At North Carolina A&T State University, administrators used funding from the rescue plan to provide affordable housing to students who struggled the most during the pandemic.
Bold investments in college completion can level up our entire system of higher education.
The Biden-Harris administration is helping to accelerate that progress. Today we’re announcing a new $5-million College Completion Fund. Grants from the fund will help underresourced colleges invest in completion and retention — and help us make the case to Congress for more funding for this vital work. And this week, the Department of Education announced that it would renew Project Success for another three years. That program helps HBCUs and other underserved institutions use evidence-based strategies to improve student outcomes.
Our team believes that bold investments in college completion can level up our entire system of higher education, helping students who often face enormous challenges make it to graduation day.
I can think of no work more worthy of prestige than putting higher education within the reach of more Americans, and helping our students attain degrees that change their lives — just as mine did for me.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
OPINION
Miguel Cardona
Miguel Cardona is the U.S. secretary of education.
Let’s not fault the rankings for the tendency of applicants and their parents, or many of the colleges themselves, to obsess over them or otherwise misuse them. They are quite useful for guidance as long as you take the time to go beyond that single number each college is reduced to.
The best way to use rankings, in our family’s experience, is to use the individual components to start filtering. Military academies and single sex schools might be an easy place for some families to start, as is recruitability for a sport.
Move on to geography and eliminate schools in locations that are nonstarters for you. For example, if you don’t want the added expense or uncertainty of air travel, if you hate hot weather or snow, if you would be miserable without a city nearby—these will take a large number of schools off your list. The key is to only use criteria you have strong feelings about. If you are at all ambivalent, leave it in. Other preferences you can use to filter, again only if you have strong feelings, are number of undergraduates, male/female ratio, average class size.
I live in a community that sometimes seems to worship the ranking number. This has led to many kids going off to schools where they are miserable for exogenous reasons (e.g., size, location) rather than attending a lesser ranked school where they could have had a great undergrad experience.
One thing often overlooked is a school’s endowment, both in the aggregate and in terms of endowment per student. Schools with smaller endowments have less to spend on student needs (dorm upgrades, campus speakers, etc.) and professorial enrichment.
Another overlooked metric is public university rankings. It always pays to see where your state university ranks among other state universities.
You now have a short(er) list and can start to look at personal issues such as affordability, whether your grades, scores and extracurriculars are within range, the culture of the school, whether they have they have an academic program you might want, etc.
Of course, you could spent hours upon hours flipping between web pages for dozens of colleges and universities to ferret out all this information. Or, you could simply go to US News and World Report’s ranking website.
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. College rankings are not a joke. Rather, used properly, they are a goldmine of useful information.
You don’t need rankings, just a searchable list of colleges (of which there are many) to do what you are describing here.
I agree. This is how our family has used rankings in our college search. I don’t think they’re useless, just that very few people know how to properly use them.
Haha, a real pro move here! I have indeed looked up all the endowments for the colleges on S23’s list. I only knew this was important because I previously worked at a school that had a so-so endowment and it terrified a lot of the faculty. Even amongst parents on CC, researching endowments is not a super common thing to do.
But students are less beholden to where their parents live and their zip code when they apply to college than they are when they are attending elementary and secondary school.
So, while we can say we are going to fix educational inequality at the primary levels until we do, college needs to be the equalizer. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/19/learning/how-much-has-your-zip-code-determined-your-opportunities.html
yes, perhaps we are. To me, addressing root causes means taking leadership steps to fix them at the start, not telling others, i.e., the colleges, to address them after-the-fact.
Think of it this way: in the 60’s & 70’s, American auto manufacturers cranked out millions of cars per year, each with hundreds of things that had to be fixed by the dealers, bcos initial manufacturing quality was so poor. That gave the Japanese manufacturers a chance to shine with their increasingly high quality vehicles. It took years for the Big 3 to catch up. (remember Ford’s old marketing campaign, 'Quality is Job 1".)
In essence, Cardona is calling out the rankings for society’s failure to have an effective K12 system. That’s like blaming umpires when a pitcher can’t find the plate. Or, blaming an auto magazine’s reviewers for poor quality manufacturing.
First off, I totally agree that there needs to be a huge focus on education from birth-grade 12 in the U.S. and a lot more resources and attention focused there.
But, an interesting question has arisen as to whether or not the Secretary of Education should be concerning himself with college rankings.
How many families want their children to go to a Top X school because of the opportunities that going to a Top 20 (for instance) school may result in as compared to a Top 200 (for instance) school? As others have said, the subject matter shouldn’t necessarily be changing much (human anatomy, math, and Shakespeare are pretty much the same whether taught at UCLA (#20 in USNWR) or U. of Wyoming (#196 in USNWR). But the cachet of the higher-ranking school may lead to more on-campus employment recruiting (or higher-paying employment) or to better grad school placements, etc.
Higher-ranking schools probably have an easier time with fundraising, capitalizing on their ranking to bring in more money for better lab equipment, paying staff for increased stability, providing financial resources for more student lab assistants or special programming, etc.
I am not opposed to a ranking. I just think that the metrics being used for the ranking matter. For instance, I’m all in favor of looking at the number of classes with fewer than 20 students. From my personal experience, that has a big impact on student learning. But going to back to the K-12 topic, how good is a school with great test results if students need to test in as gifted to attend? Is it possible that it’s a great school with wonderful instruction? Absolutely. Or it could be filled with staff that aren’t the most effective, but still get high scores because of the innate abilities and drive of the students who attend. In comparison, there can be a school that receives students with a lot of academic deficits that need lots of support in many areas of life. They can make huge strides in all of those areas, but because the students’ test scores aren’t as high, the school is then considered not as “good” of a school.
To me, the quality of a school has more to do with what they do with the student they receive than with which student they started off with it. I think that Cardona feels the same way, and since rankings have a lot of influence on student choice and funding, he thinks that the rankings should be reconsidered.
I think the writer of the article probably focused on Cardona’s remarks to be a bit provocative and because they knew it would get attention. it certainly grabbed my attention! In another comment upthread, I posted the full text of an essay Cardona wrote for colleges, which is a much more balanced take on the issue.
I am in complete agreement with the need to fix the mistakes at the start. However, once they get to college, the colleges shouldn’t just absolve themselves of any responsibility to help reconcile inequalities. I don’t think that the education secretary trying to help out at the PreK-12 level AND at the college level are mutually exclusive. This is something a lot of college employees care desperately about and are eager for college level programs to address. Even though more should have been done earlier, it’s not like students are a lost cause once they’re in college.
In browsing some of Cardona’s remarks on K-12, it seems like he has a pretty comprehensive platform for addressing these root causes across childhood. That’s not reflected in the articles I quoted.
Then perhaps the Secretary could form his own list of colleges seeking to address social inequalities.
The current USNWR list is useful to that publication in generating revenue, and to colleges in establishing their credit rating for Moody’s to determine the school’s cost of capital. Others are free to use it, or not, for their own purposes, but that list isn’t going away.
Well, he did name a bunch of them in the essay I posted upthread. I don’t know if he intends to make a formal list. That’s a good idea and I hope he does it.
I don’t think that USNWR rankings are useless, nor do I think they’re going away. I’m not sure if the secretary was being hyperbolic or if he actually thinks they are useless. He’s certain to have ruffled some feathers with his statement, and I will be interested to see if he qualifies it later.
If people are interested in sharing what they think is important in a ranking, this thread would be a good place to share it: Create Your Dream College Ranking Methodology
I don’t think there can be a universal ranking system, because there isn’t a universal acceptance of what should be ranked. That doesn’t mean each family shouldn’t try to rank schools. We all do. They are individually derived though. That’s why my favorite program is Michelle Karchmer’s (sp?) DIY College Rankings. It’s just an easy to navigate form of all the IPEDS data.
Malcom Gladwell wrote a great essay entitled The Order of Things years ago on why universal ranking systems are so poor.
I think that was a well written opinion piece. The secretary of education should take a look at Modern States and their “freshman year for free” program.
They’re the same pet schools slightly rearranged every year. All the favorite schools stay on top. All the “less favorite” schools go in the middle. And the “less less favored” schools go in the bottom. No one really knows how they come up with these rankings. My theory is that they’re just the same pet schools slightly rearranged every year.
Yes, no two families or educators or politicians will agree on all components of a ranking system. Sports like gymnastics and figure skating have tried to establish more objective judging standards, but there is still subjectivity involved in how those athletes are scored. Rankings of recruited athletes exist, and are subjective, and even for college football rankings, there is lots of subjectivity involved. And there are often times when people will have a different point of view as to athlete/team is better than another. That doesn’t stop the rankings from happening, however.
I’ve read that piece in The New Yorker before and it’s a good read. For families, it is undoubtedly best to be able to create their own rankings with their own weights (and the thread linked above is for people to share what their own ranking system would be).
But so long as a ranking is created and is highly influential, then I think it’s fair game to discuss what criteria should make up that ranking (and I find it interesting 
).
I tried finding Michelle Karchmer’s DIY College Rankings, and the most relevant search results on a general web search were from you here at CC. 
Is CC still blocking access to the link?