Columbia University will not participate in the next U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges nationwide after a Columbia math professor questioned the accuracy of the data that earned it the No. 2 spot in the influential ranking, the university announced Thursday the evening.
The deadline for submitting ranking data is Friday, and a university spokesman said officials needed more time to analyze the data and respond to criticisms raised by Professor Michael Thaddeus.
In a scathing 21-page critique posted on his website in February, Dr. Thaddeus not only challenged the data behind the rankings, but added fuel to the debate over whether college rankings — used by millions of prospective students and their parents — are valuable or even exactly.
“Columbia’s leaders take these matters seriously, and we immediately began a review of our data collection and submission process,” Columbia Provost Mary S. Boyce said in the release.
Columbia stood by its data at the time, but Dr. Boyce said the university was “now carefully reviewing our processes in light of the issues raised.”
“The current review is a matter of integrity,” she continued. “We’re not going to take shortcuts to get it right.”
Columbia spokesman Ben Chang said he did not want to speculate on when Columbia would re-enter the rankings.
For an Ivy League school like Columbia to withdraw from the rankings, even temporarily, is a blow to their reputation and could prompt other universities to reconsider their participation as well. Many college presidents complain that the rankings force them to emphasize statistics that oversimplify what it takes to find a good match between a student and a school.
Dr. Thaddeus said Thursday night that the move raises a host of questions that Colombia has yet to answer.
“Is the university expressing its disapproval of the US News rankings themselves?” he wrote in an email. “Will he retire in the coming years as well?” Why can’t the job be completed? What in the issues I raised clearly derailed the process?’
The university has not made “any substantive responses to the specific issues I have raised,” he added.
In criticizing Dr. Thaddeus, he cites evidence he has collected that suggests Columbia has made its undergraduate classes appear smaller, its tuition costs appear greater, and its faculty appear more highly educated.
The next edition of the ranking is scheduled to be released in September, officials said. To help prospective students cope without it, Dr. Boyce said Columbia plans to release a common data set in the fall, a loosely standardized set of statistics used by institutions of higher education. She said it will include much of the same information that is included in the US News profiles.
Dr. Thaddeus said he understood that Columbia had prepared such data sets in the past for its own internal use but had not made them public.
“The thing is, they have documents that would shed light on their previous submissions to US News — and could even reveal whether their misstatements were intentional or unintentional — but they refuse to make them public, even after an overwhelming majority of faculty who voted asked them to do so,” he said.
Mr. Chang, the spokesman, declined to comment on Dr. Thaddeus’ remarks about the overall data set, but noted Columbia’s promise to release a data set this fall. “The university has long conducted what it believes to be a thorough process,” he said. “Our goal is maximum accuracy and transparency.”
Critics say the US News formula tends to reward schools based on wealth and reputation.
In his analysis, Dr Thaddeus, who is a specialist in algebraic geometry, found key supporting data provided by Columbia to be “inaccurate, questionable or highly misleading”.
This year Colombia moved up one spot in the rankings to number 2; the university was surpassed only by Princeton and tied with Harvard and MIT
Dr. Thaddeus noted that Colombia was ranked 18th in 1988, a rise he said was remarkable. “Why did Colombia’s fortunes improve so dramatically?” he asked in his analysis.
Columbia University is not the first university to have its rankings questioned.
This year, the University of Southern California pulled its education school from the US News rankings because of inaccuracies in data going back five years. And a former dean of Temple University’s business school pleaded guilty last year to using fraudulent data between 2014 and 2018 to boost the school’s national rankings and boost revenue. The school’s online MBA program was ranked the best in the country by US News & World Report during the years he falsified data.
Over the years, other schools such as Iona College, Claremont McKenna College and Emory University have been found to have falsified or manipulated data.
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