Ivy League University Removed From U.S. News & World Report Rankings

You won’t find vaunted Columbia University in this year’s U.S. News & World Report rankings of America’s top colleges, after the Ivy League school failed to verify key data the magazine uses to formulate its prestigious annual list.

Columbia, which was tied with Harvard and MIT for No. 2 behind Princeton in last year’s rankings, is missing from a revised version of this year’s edition. The magazine’s rankings are gospel for parents and high-achieving high school graduates looking to gain admission to top schools. But without key data, the publication was forced to give the New York school an incomplete.

“To date, Columbia has been unable to provide satisfactory responses to the information U.S. News requested,” the outlet said in a statement last week.

Making matters worse, Columbia announced that it would not submit data for the 2023 edition either, after questions were raised by one of the school’s own math professors about the veracity of data previously turned over to U.S. News & World Report. It was the professor’s questions that prompted the magazine’s fruitless effort to verify data for the current list.

Columbia Provost Mary Boyce argued that the university could not submit any data when it was still under review and stated that the internal review would not be completed by the July 1 deadline for the 2022 edition of U.S. News, Best Colleges.

“Columbia has long conducted what we believed to be a thorough process for gathering and reporting institutional data, but we are now closely reviewing our processes in light of the questions raised,” she wrote in a statement on June 30. “The ongoing review is a matter of integrity. We will take no shortcuts in getting it right.”

Many college presidents have complained about the ‘misleading’ nature of the ranking system, but very few have pulled out of the system, and over 11,000 institutions of higher learning submit information to the magazine. Only ~0.1% of these schools inform the publication that they have misreported data, and U.S. News does not independently audit their claims.

“What is clear is there’s no third-party vetting,” Michael Thaddeus, the Columbia professor who initially raised concerns about his school’s data, said in a statement to the New York Times. “At some point there has to be third-party auditing since these data are so important and so many people are making final decisions based upon the data. It won’t do to say these data are self-reported and there’s no way to check them.”

“I had hoped, still hope, that this episode would bring much more attention to the foibles and the failures of the ranking system,” said Colin Diver, former president of Reed College, and author of the book, “Breaking Ranks,” a critique of the college ranking system. “Unfortunately, most of higher education, especially the elite part, publicly criticizes the rankings right and left, and yet they cooperate with them.”

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases