Some colleges will do anything to improve their rankings by U.S. News & World Report and other publications.
The popular lists of Best Colleges as well as the top professional programs in law and business are released each year by financial magazines and news outlets, and there have been university officials known to game the system. Some have misrepresented data or massaged and fudged numbers. And some have lied about their programs to better market themselves to prospective students.
Earlier this year, a former dean of Temple University’s business school was sentenced to prison after he was found guilty of using fake numbers in a complex fraud operation aimed at boosting that school’s national rankings and increase revenue.
Just this past week, meanwhile, a whistleblower alleged that Rutgers Business School used a temp agency to fill sham jobs with its MBA graduates to boost its U.S. News & World Report ratings — a claim that was quickly followed with a federal class action lawsuit by a student who accused the school of fraud. By faking its employment data, the graduate student claimed the university “created an impression that post-graduation employment was virtually guaranteed.”
Rutgers officials have denied the allegations.
“We are confident in our process and procedures to accurately report to rankings publications,” a spokesman said in a statement.
Critics of the ratings themselves, though, say the focus by universities on college rankings is misguided. They argue such ratings are essentially meaningless because of the dependence on unaudited, self-reported data.
“The best college rankings are just garbage. They really are,” said Colin Diver, who details the problems and abuses involved in rankings in a new book published by Johns Hopkins Press this past week: “Breaking Ranks: How the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What to Do about.”
In his book, Diver said college rankings encourage applicants to focus on pedigree and prestige. At the same time, he added that many educators have figured out how to massage the data, “sacrificing academic integrity for short-term competitive advantage.”
Most importantly, he said there is no way to ensure the accuracy of the information. The only constraint, he observed, was what he called the “Straight Face Test.”
As in: “Can we say this with a straight face?”
Still, many universities — including Rutgers — heavily publicize their rankings on websites and promotional material to applicants. And although there may be private grumbling among college administrators, few speak out publicly against the rankings.
Indeed, a number of New Jersey institutions that in the past have threatened to boycott ranking surveys not only ended up participating, but now showcase those numbers.
Several universities in New Jersey, asked how they view rankings, declined comment. However, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber, in an op-ed in the Washington Post last year, admitted he was no fan of the lists despite topping the U.S. News & World Report rankings for 11 years running.
“I am convinced that the rankings game is a bit of mishegoss (Yiddish for craziness, senseless behavior) — a slightly daft obsession that does harm when colleges, parents, or students take it too seriously,” he wrote. “Don’t get me wrong. I am proud of Princeton’s teaching, research and commitment to service. I like seeing our quality recognized. Rankings, however, are a misleading way to assess colleges and universities.”
Fairleigh Dickinson University President Christopher A. Capuano called rankings “often an incomplete and very imperfect measurement,” adding that even the ones that are done well “only indicate a small snapshot of a university” and its programs.
“It’s unfortunate that the pressure to do well in rankings has caused some institutions to try to manipulate the data in order to rise above others,” Capuano remarked. “That said, many people use the major rankings to guide their decision-making process, so Fairleigh Dickinson University does indeed pay attention to rankings and tries to be as responsive as possible to provide accurate data.”
And FDU does promote the fact that many of its programs are highly ranked, he added.
“FDU is certainly proud when a particular ranking rates the institution highly,” he said.
In 2011, Montclair State University along with many other colleges and universities around the country raised questions about plans by U.S. News & World Report to partner with an education research group to issue ratings teachers’ colleges around the country. Montclair, argued the rankings would “mislead the public,” and said they would boycott the ranking survey. The college later reversed course.
“We ultimately participated in the rankings because the National Council on Teacher Quality filed an Open Public Records Act request for the necessary data, so as a public institution, we were legally required to provide it,” explained Montclair State spokesman Andrew Mees.
But he said the university and its College of Education and Human Services were not opposed to rankings, and voluntarily submits data to several that evaluate both the entire university and individual programs.
“Universities are complex institutions that serve a wide variety of learners with different goals and expectations for their education,” Mees said. “All of the ranking systems are based on a relatively small number of variables that may or may not measure what’s important to someone. At best, rankings are an imprecise way to understand a university. Students may want to consider rankings and guidebooks as part of their selection process, but ultimately they need to find the college that best meets their individual needs.”
U.S. News defended its rankings and methodology.
“We rely on schools to accurately report their data and ask academic officials to verify that data,” the magazine said in a statement. “We haven’t read Mr. Diver’s book, but we know students and their families find significant value in our rankings. We strive to provide them with data and information to help make important decisions, using the rankings as one factor in their college search.”
Diver, the former dean of the law school at the University of Pennsylvania, said rankings have long loomed large in that world. He said law students are “very status conscious” in selecting schools that are largely not much different from one another, and so a top ranking can be a game changer.
His arguments against rankings carried on when he later became president of Reed College, a private liberal arts school in Portland, Ore., that refused to fill out the annual peer evaluations and statistical surveys used by U.S. News and other ratings groups to compile its rankings.
In a 2005 essay for The Atlantic, he explained that one-size-fits-all ranking schemes undermined the institutional diversity that characterizes American higher education. And even then, he warned as well that rankings could “create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior for the sole or primary purpose of inflating one’s score.”
Meanwhile, in just the past few months, questions about accuracy and the credibility of college rankings have played out in institutions big and small across the country.
The University of Southern California announced last month it was withdrawing its education school from U.S. News & World Report’s graduate-school rankings after determining it had provided the publication with inaccurate data going back at least five years.
The scandal at Temple University’s business school led to the conviction of Moshe Porat, 74, who was convicted of federal wire fraud and conspiracy charges for his role as dean in the cheating scheme that sought to raise the ranking of the university’s Fox School of Business in Philadelphia.
The Fox School of Business on the Temple University campus. Moshe Porat, its former dean, was sentenced to prison after he was found guilty last year with falsifying data to boost the school’s rankings, draw more students and vastly increase the school’s revenue.AP
The school’s online MBA program had been ranked best in the country by U.S. News & World Report in the years that he provided falsified data.
Porat was sentenced last month to 14 months in prison.
At Columbia University, Michael Thaddeus, a math professor who specializes in algebraic geometry challenged the university’s No. 2 ranking, posting a statistical analysis that questioned the key supporting data that had led to meteoric rise in the school’s standings.
“A few other top-tier universities have also improved their standings, but none has matched Columbia’s extraordinary rise. It is natural to wonder what the reason might be,” he remarked. His conclusion was that several of the key figures supporting Columbia’s high ranking were “inaccurate, dubious, or highly misleading.”
At Rutgers Business School, allegations against the university were brought in a lawsuit by Deidre White, the business school’s human resources manager. She claimed the university used a temp agency to hire unemployed MBA students, placing them into sham positions at Rutgers itself — for no other reason than to make it appear like a greater number of graduates were getting full-time jobs.
“The fraud worked,” wrote White’s attorney. “In the very first year of the scheme, they said Rutgers “was suddenly propelled to, among other things, the No. 1 business school in the Northeast.”
Days later, Rutgers was hit with a second lawsuit in federal court an MBA students who claimed he was defrauded by the university.
Lorenzo Budet, 33, of Atlantic City charged that Rutgers intentionally reported false data and made misleading claims in its marketing materials, falsely asserting that unemployed students were purported gainfully employed in full-time MBA-level jobs with a third-party temp agency.
In his lawsuit, Budet — a graduate student at Rutgers in its Supply Chain Management MBA program — said by bolstering its employment data, Rutgers Business School created an impression that employment following graduation “was virtually guaranteed.”
“Rutgers Business School allegedly reported misleading data to U.S. News and World Report, among other educational ranking organizations, to boost its rankings. But just as falsification of data is a violation of Rutgers’ own Academic Integrity Policy, Rutgers needs to be held accountable here under the law,” said Budet’s attorney, Charles Kocher of McOmber McOmber & Luber in Marlton.
The university declined to comment on the specifics of the litigation.
“We will say without equivocation, however, that we take seriously our obligation to accurately report data and other information to ranking and reporting agencies,” the university said in a statement. “The Rutgers Business School strictly follows the MBA Career Services & Employer Alliance guidelines in submitting MBA statistics and similarly follows the appropriate guidelines in submitting undergraduate statistics.”
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Ted Sherman may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL.
