US News & World Report has removed Columbia University from its “best colleges” ranking after one of the school’s own professors uncovered discrepancies in the data Columbia submitted to US News. After a follow-up from the magazine, the university failed to substantiate its numbers on class sizes, educational expenditures, and other self-reported data points it had sent to US News. Columbia was duly demoted to “unranked” status.
The university’s conduct is reprehensible, and US News is well-advised to delist it. But the scandal is not an isolated incident. Rather, it is the latest in a series of proven or alleged data-falsification scandals at other elite universities like Emory, Temple, Rutgers, and USC. And those are just the incidents that have come to light. Misreporting appears widespread enough to make the rankings untrustworthy. US News should therefore suspend its college rankings until their journalists can develop a methodology less vulnerable to manipulation.
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