Columbia University will not participate in the upcoming U.S. News and World Rankings of universities across the country after a Columbia mathematics professor questioned the accuracy of the data that secured its No. 2 spot in influential rankings, the university announced Thursday night.
The deadline to submit data for grading is Friday, and a university spokesman said officials needed more time to analyze the data and address criticism raised by professor Michael Thaddeus.
In a 21-page review that Dr. Thaddeus posted on his website in February that he not only challenged the data behind the grade, but added fuel to the debate over whether college rankings, used by millions of prospective college students and their parents, are valuable. or even accurate.
“Columbia leaders take these questions seriously and we immediately embarked on a review of our data collection and submission process,” Columbia Rector Mary C. Boyce said in the announcement.
At the time, Columbia kept its data, but Dr. Boyce said the university “is now closely reviewing our processes in light of the questions raised.”
“The ongoing review is a matter of integrity,” he continued. “We won’t take shortcuts to do it right.”
A Columbia spokesman, Ben Chang, said he did not want to speculate on when Columbia would return to participate in the ranking.
That an Ivy League school like Columbia is removed from the rankings, even temporarily, is a blow to its reputation and could spur other universities to reconsider their involvement as well. Many university presidents complain that rankings force them to emphasize statistics that oversimplify what is needed to find a good match between a student and a school.
Dr. Thaddeus said Thursday night that the measure raised a number of questions that Columbia had not yet answered.
“Is the university expressing its disapproval of the same US news rankings?” wrote in an email. “Will he also retire in the coming years? Why can’t the work be finished? What about the questions I asked that apparently derailed the process? “
The university had not made “any substantive response to the specific issues I raised,” he added.
To the criticism of Dr. Thaddeus, cited evidence he gathered that suggested Columbia had made its undergraduate classes seem smaller, its spending on instruction seemed larger, and its teachers seemed more highly educated.
The next edition of the ranking is scheduled to come out in September, officials said. To help prospective students navigate without this, Dr. Boyce said Columbia planned to publish a common data set in the fall, a set of poorly standardized statistics used by higher education institutions. He said it would include much of the same information that is included in U.S. news profiles.
Dr. Thaddeus said he understood that Columbia had prepared these data sets in the past for its own internal use, but did not make them public.
“The point is that they have documents that illuminate their pre-US News presentations, and they can even reveal whether their misrepresentations were intentional or unintentional, but they refuse to make them public, even after “an overwhelming majority of teachers who voted. asked them to do so,” he said.
Mr. Chang, the spokesman, declined to comment on Dr. Chang’s remarks. Thaddeus on the common dataset, but noted Columbia’s promise to release a dataset this fall. “The university has long carried out what it believed was a thorough process,” he said. “Our goal is maximum accuracy and transparency.”
Critics have said the US News formula tends to reward schools based on wealth and reputation.
In his analysis, Dr. Thaddeus, who specializes in algebraic geometry, found the key supporting data presented by Columbia to be “inaccurate, questionable, or very misleading.”
This year, Columbia moved up one place in the rankings to No. 2; the university was only surpassed by Princeton and tied with Harvard and MIT
Dr. Thaddeus noted that Columbia ranked 18th in 1988, a rise that suggested it was remarkable. “Why has Columbia’s fortune improved so dramatically?” he asked in his analysis.
Columbia is not the first university to question its ranking data.
This year, the University of Southern California removed its school of education from the U.S. news rankings due to inaccuracies in the data dating back five years. And a former dean of Temple University’s business school was found guilty last year of using fraudulent data between 2014 and 2018 to improve the school’s national ranking and increase revenue. The school’s online MBA program was ranked best in the country by U.S. News & World Report in the years when it falsified data.
Over the years, it has been found that other schools such as Iona College, Claremont McKenna College and Emory University have falsified or manipulated data.