Columbia University plummeted to No. 18 on the new U.S. News Best Colleges list after a math professor this year questioned the integrity of data the school gave for the rankings, Gothamist reported.
Columbia, an Ivy League school in New York City had previously been No. 2 on the list behind Princeton University.
Michael Thaddeus, the Columbia math professor whose criticism sparked the controversy, said the U.S. News list was, in any case, irrelevant.
"Does it make sense to conclude from this folly that Columbia is the 18th best American university, worse than Cornell [No. 17] but better than Berkeley [No. 20]?" Thaddeus said in an email to Gothamist. "Of course not - that would be ridiculous. The only thing that makes sense is paying no attention to these bogus rankings at all."
Thaddeus added that the rankings, which the top colleges use as a marketing tool, "are garbage on so many levels. The most fundamental level is that universities themselves submit data about themselves. And they have a very strong interest, of course, in the data being as favorable as possible."
On Friday, Columbia issued a statement announcing results from an internal review it has been conducting since the summer, acknowledging that some of its data on class sizes had been "reported incorrectly" to U.S. News, and that the university's methodology for determining faculty with terminal degrees led to cases of overreporting.
Robert Morse, chief data strategist at U.S. News, said Columbia's new rank was based on data collected from the federal government's National Center for Education Statistics, the College Scorecard, and the publication's own peer assessment survey.
Thaddeus said that although Columbia had taken the correct steps by acknowledging some data discrepancies in their submission, he asserted that they had failed to produce a more comprehensive accounting of how things went wrong and who is responsible for it.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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