Without fanfare, US News & World Report announced that it had “unranked” Columbia University, which was in a three-way tie for the No. 2 spot in the 2022 edition of Best Colleges, after it was unable to verify the underlying data that were submitted. from the University. The decision was published on the US News website a week after Columbia announced it was withdrawing from the upcoming 2023 ranking. The Ivy League university said at the time that it would not participate in the next ranking because it was investigating accusations by one of its own math professors that the No. 2 ranking was based on inaccurate and misleading data. The biggest beneficiaries may be Harvard and MIT, which had shared second place with Columbia, and now have one less competitor. Princeton retains its rights as No. 1. Rankings are influential among students applying to college because objectively comparing schools and visiting every campus of interest can be difficult. College presidents have complained bitterly that the ratings are misleading, yet few institutions have left the game.
Recent Issues on America’s College Campuses
Enrollment crisis: New data shows 662,000 fewer students enrolled in undergraduate programs in spring 2022 than a year earlier, a 4.7 percent decline. Harvard president: Lawrence S. Backow, who guided the university through the pandemic and an attack on its admissions policies, announced he will step down in 2023. Affirmative action: As the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legality of two race-conscious admissions programs, a lawyer who helped draft a Texas abortion ban has offered a new path to affirmative action critics. 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. He decided to quit anyway.
“I hoped, I still hope, that this episode would bring a lot more attention to the flaws and failures of the ranking system,” said Colin Diver, former president of Reed College, who has written a book, “Breaking Ranks.” about the college ranking industry. “Unfortunately, most of higher education, especially the elite part, publicly criticizes rankings left and right, and yet cooperates with them. Formula ratings tend to reinforce schools’ established reputations, Mr. Dytis said. In its blog post Thursday, US News said that after learning of the criticism in March, it asked Columbia to substantiate the data it had reported, including information about the number of full-time and part-time faculty, the number of full-time faculty with the highest degree in their field, student-faculty ratio, undergraduate class size, and education costs. “To date, Columbia has been unable to provide satisfactory responses to the information requested by US News,” the post said. 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 Performers in Social Mobility — because those rankings used data from university statistical surveys. The agency has unranked universities in the past, he said. Columbia had initially defended its statistics, but said in a statement Friday that it “takes seriously the questions raised about our data submission” and would not submit further “undergraduate information” to US News while its own investigation was in progress. “There can be no hasty review,” the university wrote. “While we are disappointed by US News & World Report’s decision, we view this as a matter of integrity and will not take shortcuts to get it right.” US News has acknowledged that it relies on universities to verify their submitted data, which can be extensive, and that it does not have the resources to conduct independent audits. But the decision to remove Columbia from the current rankings once 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 annually inform US News that they have misreported data, he said. It provided a list of several dozen schools that had admitted to misreporting data since 2019 and had been suspended a year for their honesty. Michael Thaddeus, the math professor who first raised questions about the Columbia data on his website in February, said the news showed the flaws of a ranking system that did not independently examine the data behind it. “What is clear is that there is no third-party control,” Dr. Thaddeus said. “At some point there has to be a third-party audit, as this data is so important and so many people make final decisions based on the data. It doesn’t mean that this data is self-reported and there’s no way to check it.” US News nodded to critics in its Columbia op-ed this week. “We remain concerned and are considering various options to ensure that our ranking continues to maintain the highest levels of integrity,” it said. Mr. Diver said it was standard practice for US News to suspend schools for cheating or misreporting ranking data. But he said that usually happened when the school had admitted to the incorrect report or there was some kind of independent verification. “I guess they chose to do that because there were credible accusations that they had inflated that data on those different measures,” he said. Princeton 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 am convinced that the rankings game is a bit silly – a slightly silly obsession that hurts when colleges, parents or students take it too seriously,” he wrote. Because students felt pressured to get into highly ranked schools, he said, schools pooled resources to move up the rankings, at the expense of goals such as admitting more talented low-income students. Alain Delaquérière contributed to the research.
