New York Occasions, Columbia College Drops Out of U.S. Information Rankings for Undergraduate Faculties:

Columbia College introduced on Tuesday that its undergraduate colleges would now not take part within the U.S. Information & World Report school rankings, the primary main college to refuse to produce data to the influential undergraduate information for college students and oldsters. …

Columbia’s transfer comes after it dropped within the rankings launched in September — to No. 18 from No. 2 — and after many prestigious legislation and medical colleges, together with Columbia’s, determined to boycott the listings by refusing to offer knowledge to U.S. Information. …

U.S. Information mentioned it has listened to the critics. It introduced in Could that new methodology for undergraduate applications would give elevated weight to a college’s success in graduating college students from totally different backgrounds.

And in a transfer that instructed that it needed to immunize itself towards a bigger exodus, U.S. Information mentioned that it could now not depend on knowledge that solely faculties might present. It additionally just lately urged Miguel A. Cardona, the U.S. secretary of training, to demand that colleges present open entry to their undergraduate and graduate faculty knowledge. …

It was a math professor at Columbia, Michael Thaddeus, who set off a minimum of a number of the backlash towards the U.S. Information rankings in early 2022 when he posted a 21-page evaluation of the rankings, accusing his personal faculty of submitting statistics that have been “inaccurate, doubtful or extremely deceptive.”

Dr. Thaddeus mentioned he had discovered discrepancies within the knowledge that Columbia equipped to U.S. Information, involving class dimension and proportion of school with terminal levels — two of the metrics that U.S. Information introduced it was eliminating from its calculations.

The fallout from his accusations led Columbia to acknowledge that it had supplied deceptive knowledge, and the varsity didn’t submit new knowledge final yr. Tuesday’s announcement makes that call everlasting. …

After Yale dropped out of the legislation faculty rankings final yr, dozens of different elite legislation and medical colleges rapidly adopted — amongst them Harvard, the College of Pennsylvania and Stanford — however most colleges stayed in.

This time, with enrollment down, and lots of undergraduate colleges attempting to find college students, a mass defection appears unlikely.

Prior TaxProf Weblog protection:

• Michael Thaddeus (Professor of Arithmetic, Columbia), An Investigation of the Details Behind Columbia’s U.S. Information Rating (Mar. 8, 2022)
• New York Occasions, U.S. Information Ranked Columbia No. 2, However A Math Professor Has His Doubts (Mar. 21, 2022)
• Wall Avenue Journal, Columbia Will Not Submit Information To U.S. Information This 12 months After Math Professor Questioned Its #2 Rating (July 1, 2022)
• U.S. Information Kicks Columbia Out Of The 2022 Faculty Rankings After Math Professor Questioned Its #2 Rating (July 9, 2022)
• Wall Avenue Journal, Columbia Admits Submitting Incorrect Information That Goosed Its U.S. Information Rating To #2 (Sept. 10, 2022)
• Chronicle of Larger Training, Columbia’s U.S. Information Rating Plummets From #2 To #18, Its Lowest Rating Since 1988 (Sept. 13, 2022)

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