What is the equivalent of “disbarred” or “disbarred” in the world of college rankings? Could it be “unranked”?
Without fanfare, US News & World Report announced that it had “dropped” Columbia University from its No. 2 spot in its 2022 Best Colleges edition after failing to verify the data the university submitted to support its ranking .
The decision was published on the US News website Thursday, a week after Columbia announced it was withdrawing from the upcoming 2023 rankings. At the time, the university said it would not participate in subsequent rankings as it investigated allegations by one of its own professors of math that the #2 ranking is based on inaccurate and misleading data.
The US News post said that in March, after learning of the criticism, it asked Columbia to substantiate the data it reported, including information on the number of full-time and part-time faculty, the number of full-time faculty with the highest degree in its field, student-faculty ratio, student class size, and cost of education.
“To date, Columbia has been unable to provide satisfactory responses to the information requested by US News,” the post said.
Recent publications on America’s colleges
- Enrollment crunch: New data shows 662,000 fewer students enrolled in bachelor’s programs in the spring of 2022 than a year earlier, a 4.7 percent drop.
- Harvard president: Lawrence S. Bacow, who has led the university through the pandemic as well as an attack on its admissions policies, has announced he will step down in 2023.
- Affirmative action: As the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legality of two racially biased admissions programs, a lawyer who helped draft Texas’ abortion ban has offered a new path to affirmative action criticism.
- Free speech: A legal scholar who wrote that President Biden would nominate “one less black woman” to the Supreme Court has been cleared to take a new job at Georgetown after an investigation. Still, he decided to retire.
Robert Morse, chief data strategist at US News, wrote in an email Friday that Columbia is no longer ranked in several categories — 2022 National Universities, 2022 Best Value Schools and 2022 Top Scorers in Social Mobility — so with these rankings using data from university statistical studies. The organization has had unranked universities before, he said.
Columbia said in a statement Friday that it “takes seriously the questions raised about the submission of our data” and that it would not provide additional “undergraduate-related information” to US News while its own investigation is underway.
“A thorough review cannot be rushed,” the university wrote. “While we are disappointed by US News and World Report’s decision, we believe this is a matter of integrity and will not take any shortcuts to get it right.”
US News acknowledged that it relies on universities to verify the data they submit, which can be extensive, and that it does not have the resources to conduct independent audits. But the decision to remove Colombia from the current rankings has again raised questions about their overall accuracy.
In a separate blog post, Mr. Morse said US News publishes annual rankings for more than 11,500 schools and hundreds of individual programs. Typically, less than 0.1 percent a year inform US News that they reported wrong data, he said.
He provided a list of several dozen schools that have admitted to misreporting data since 2019 and were suspended for a year for their candor.
The rankings are influential among students applying to college because objectively comparing schools and visiting each campus they are interested in can be difficult. College presidents complained bitterly that the rankings were misleading, yet few institutions dropped out.
“I hoped, I still hope, that this episode would bring a lot more attention to the weaknesses and failures of the ranking system,” said Colin Diver, a former president of Reed College who wrote a book, “Breaking the Ranks,” about the ranking industry. ranking of colleges. “Unfortunately, most of higher education, especially the elite part, publicly criticizes the rankings right and left, yet they cooperate with them.”
Michael Thaddeus, the mathematics professor who first raised questions about Columbia’s data on his Web page in February, said the news points to the flaws of a ranking system that doesn’t independently verify the data behind it.
“Clearly there is no third-party verification,” Dr Thaddeus said. “At some point, there has to be a third-party audit because this data is so important and so many people make final decisions based on the data. It won’t do you any good to say that this data is self-reported and there is no way to verify it.
US News nodded to critics in its coverage of Colombia this week. “We remain concerned and are reviewing various options to ensure that our rankings continue to maintain the highest levels of integrity,” it said.
Mr. Diver said it is standard practice for US News to suspend schools for cheating or misreporting ranking data. But he said that usually happens when the school has admitted it misreported or there has been some kind of independent review. “I guess they chose to do that because there were credible allegations that they inflated those figures on those various measures,” he said.
Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post in October in which he said that although Princeton had topped the US News rankings for 11 years, he was not a fan of the list.
“I’m convinced that the rankings game is a bit of a hoax — a slightly silly obsession that hurts when colleges, parents, or students take it too seriously,” he wrote. As students feel pressure to get into high-ranking schools, he said, schools are concentrating resources on moving up the rankings, to the detriment of goals such as admitting more talented, low-income students.
Alain Delaquérière contributed to the research.
Add Comment