NY Times: Columbia University Drops Out Of U.S. News Rankings After Fall From #2 To #18 Last Year

New York Times, Columbia University Drops Out of U.S. News Rankings for Undergraduate Schools:

Columbia University announced on Tuesday that its undergraduate schools would no longer participate in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, the first major university to refuse to supply information to the influential undergraduate guide for students and parents. ...

Columbia’s move comes after it dropped in the rankings released in September — to No. 18 from No. 2 — and after many prestigious law and medical schools, including Columbia’s, decided to boycott the listings by refusing to provide data to U.S. News. ...

U.S. News said it has listened to the critics. It announced in May that new methodology for undergraduate programs would give increased weight to a school’s success in graduating students from different backgrounds.

And in a move that suggested that it wanted to immunize itself against a larger exodus, U.S. News said that it would no longer rely on data that only colleges could provide. It also recently urged Miguel A. Cardona, the U.S. secretary of education, to demand that schools provide open access to their undergraduate and graduate school data. ...

It was a math professor at Columbia, Michael Thaddeus, who set off at least some of the backlash against the U.S. News rankings in early 2022 when he posted a 21-page analysis of the rankings, accusing his own school of submitting statistics that were “inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading.”

Dr. Thaddeus said he had found discrepancies in the data that Columbia supplied to U.S. News, involving class size and percentage of faculty with terminal degrees — two of the metrics that U.S. News announced it was eliminating from its calculations.

The fallout from his accusations led Columbia to acknowledge that it had provided misleading data, and the school did not submit new data last year. Tuesday’s announcement makes that decision permanent. ...

After Yale dropped out of the law school rankings last year, dozens of other elite law and medical schools quickly followed — among them Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford — but most schools stayed in.

This time, with enrollment down, and many undergraduate schools hunting for students, a mass defection seems unlikely.

• Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia U. Withdraws From ‘U.S. News’ Undergraduate Rankings
• Wall Street Journal, Columbia University Pulls Out of U.S. News & World Report College Ranking
• Washington Post, Columbia University Ends Cooperation With U.S. News College Rankings

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• Michael Thaddeus (Professor of Mathematics, Columbia), An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia’s U.S. News Ranking (Mar. 8, 2022)
• New York Times, U.S. News Ranked Columbia No. 2, But A Math Professor Has His Doubts (Mar. 21, 2022)
• Wall Street Journal, Columbia Will Not Submit Data To U.S. News This Year After Math Professor Questioned Its #2 Ranking (July 1, 2022)
• U.S. News Kicks Columbia Out Of The 2022 College Rankings After Math Professor Questioned Its #2 Ranking (July 9, 2022)
• Wall Street Journal, Columbia Admits Submitting Incorrect Data That Goosed Its U.S. News Ranking To #2 (Sept. 10, 2022)
• Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia's U.S. News Ranking Plummets From #2 To #18, Its Lowest Ranking Since 1988 (Sept. 13, 2022)