Whiff of a scandal as Columbia falls from 2nd to 18th in key list

US News & World Report likes to say that it is performing a consumer service when it puts out its annual college rankings. But on Monday, those ratings were again called into question after the publication demoted Columbia University to No. 18 from No. 2 in its newest annual list, after a months-long controversy over whether the school had fudged its numbers.
The drop suggests that the highly influential rankings — which have been criticised for having an outsize influence on parents and college admissions — can be easily manipulated, since they rely heavily on data submitted by the varsities that directly benefit from them. Columbia’s No. 2 status was not questioned until one of its own math professors, Michael Thaddeus, in a February blog post, accused the school of submitting statistics that were “inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading. ” Last week, the university said that it had miscalculated some data.
Columbia’s public humiliation raises questions for many parents and educational policymakers: Can the quality of a college be ranked by a single number, the way critics rate
NYT movies with stars? Thaddeus said he would not draw conclusions about the quality of a Columbia education from the rankings, whether the No. 2 or the No. 18 spot. “The broader lesson everyone should keep in mind is that US News has shown its operations are so shoddy that both of them are meaningless,” he said. US News, which has been rating colleges since 1983, says that given the cost and importance of education, it is ever more important that parents and students have some kind of guide to quality schools. On Monday, it announced the 2022-23 rankings, saying Columbia’s new rank was calculated with data from US education department’s National Centre for Education Statistics, the peer assessment survey by US News, and the government’s College Scorecard.
On Friday, just before the new rankings were released, Columbia admitted that it had submitted either “outdated” or “incorrect” data in two of the metrics that go into the ranking, class size and the number of faculty with the highest degrees in their field. Columbia said the mistakes were a result, at least in part, of the “complexity” of the reporting requirements. “We deeply regret the deficiencies in our prior reporting and are committed to doing better, its provost said.