What is the equivalent of “ban” or “deprivation” in the world of university rankings? Is it “unranked”?
The US News & World Report announced that it was “not ranked” from second place in the 2022 Best Colleges because it could not validate the data that Columbia University submitted to support the rankings without fanfare.
The decision was posted on the US News website on Thursday, a week after Colombia announced that it would withdraw from the upcoming 2023 rankings. The university said it would not participate in the next ranking because it was investigating an accusation by one of its math professors that the second place was based on inaccurate and misleading data.
After learning of the criticism, a US news post asked Colombia in March to validate the reported data, including the number of full-time and part-time teachers and the number of full-time teachers. .. With the highest degree in their field, student-to-teacher ratio, undergraduate class size and education costs.
“Until now, Colombia has been unable to provide a satisfactory answer to the information requested by US News,” the post said.
Recent issues with American university campuses
- Registration crisis: According to new data, the number of students enrolled in undergraduate courses in the spring of 2022 was 662,000 less than the previous year, a decrease of 4.7%.
- Harvard University President: Lawrence S. Bakou, who piloted the university through attacks on pandemics and admissions policies, announced that he would resign in 2023.
- Affirmative action: As the Supreme Court prepares to determine the legality of two race-aware abortion programs, lawyers who helped draft a Texas abortion ban offer critics of affirmative action a new path. Did.
- Freedom of speech: Legal scholars who wrote that President Biden would nominate a “black woman” to the Supreme Court were allowed to take on a new job in Georgetown after an investigation. He decided to resign anyway.
Robert Morse, Chief Data Strategist at US News, wrote in an email on Friday that Colombia is no longer ranked in several categories (2022 National Universities, 2022 Best Value Schools, 2022 Top Performers of Social Mobility). University statistical survey. He said the organization has a previously unranked university.
Colombia said in a statement on Friday that it “takes seriously the questions raised regarding data submission” and will not submit any further “undergraduate information” to US news during its own investigation. rice field.
“We can’t rush a thorough review,” the university writes. “I’m disappointed with the US News and World Report decision, but I think it’s a matter of integrity and there’s no shortcut to doing it right.”
US News acknowledges that it is up to the university to scrutinize the submitted data. This can be huge and there are no resources to perform an independent audit. However, the decision to remove Colombia from the current ranking again cast doubt on their overall accuracy.
In another blog post, Morse said US News published an annual ranking of more than 11,500 schools and hundreds of individual programs. He said that less than 0.1% of the year usually informs US News that they have misreported their data.
He admitted false reporting data since 2019 and provided a list of dozens of schools that had been suspended for a year due to frankness.
Rankings are influential among students applying for college, as it can be difficult to objectively compare schools and visit all campuses of interest. University presidents have been fiercely complaining that rankings are misleading, but few institutions have dropped out of the game.
“We wanted this episode to draw more attention to the failures and failures of the ranking system,” said Colin Diver, a former president of Reed College who wrote the book “Breaking the Rank.” About the university ranking industry. “Unfortunately, most of the higher education, especially the elite part, publicly criticizes the left and right rankings, but they still cooperate with them.”
In February, math professor Michael Tadeus, who first asked questions about Colombian data on his web page, said the news pointed out a flaw in the ranking system that did not independently scrutinize the data behind it. ..
“The obvious thing is that there is no third-party review,” said Dr. Thaddeus. “These data are so important that so many people make final decisions based on them that at some point require a third-party audit. These data are self-reported. Yes, it doesn’t make sense to say that there is no way to check them. “
US News nodded to critics this week in a post about Colombia. “We continue to be concerned and are considering different options to ensure that our rankings maintain the highest levels of integrity,” he said.
Divers said it is a standard practice in US news to shut down schools because of fraudulent or false alarms in ranking data. But he said it usually happened when the school admitted a false alarm, or when there was some sort of independent verification. “I think they chose this because of the credible accusations that they inflated the data on these various measures,” he said.
Princeton’s president, Christopher Icegruber, wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post in October, stating that Princeton had been at the top of the US news rankings for 11 years, but he wasn’t a fan of the list.
“I’m convinced that the ranking game is a bit of Michelegos. It’s a little nifty obsession that can hurt colleges, parents, or students if they take it too seriously,” he writes. He said that students felt pressure to enroll in high school, so the school focused its resources on raising the rankings at the expense of goals such as accepting more talented low-income students. rice field.
Alain Delaqué rière Contributed to the research.